And Then There Were None
by Glory-To-Our-August-King
Summary: FN-2187 has betrayed the First Order, putting nearly a dozen Stormtroopers to the casket in his bid to escape. Left behind to deal with the fallout, his squadmates now face judgment for his crimes. OC-centric.
1. Chapter 1

**And Then There Were None**

 **Chapter 1**

There were eight of them now, soon to be seven.

Captain Phasma stepped around their tight ring at a meandering pace, a Kath hound stalking its prey.

"One weak link," she said, casting her gaze over FN Corps, her finest Stormtroopers. "Is all it takes for the chain to break."

Her audio projectors were linked to the loudspeakers, booming her voice over the landing platform being used for that morning's assembly. The other Corps were at attention on their flanks, armed and armored, while FN was made to stand in their gray training fatigues as frigid winds tumbled over them. However, there was only one squad from the 343rd Battalion gathered in the middle of it all. FN-2501 risked a glance at El-Tee, who handed the small, shuffled stack of sabacc cards to Three-Eight.

"Other imperfections must be purged," the Captain continued, black visor scanning over them, "if FN Corps is to remain taut."

2501's entire life weighed in the balance of eight flimsy pieces of castplast. She didn't believe in the Force or any of the old Empire gods, but she found herself praying to them now, or whatever one did to appease their whims. Three-Eight drew the Queen, a _-2_. _Clear_. Next was Sixer, a _9_ of Sabers. That was good, she liked him. He always knew how to get a smile out of her. Called her Lil when everyone else gave her a number. She liked that better than the numbers, even if it was born of teasing.

"Honor, strength, _loyalty_. These are the bonds that make us superior." Prowling again, passing behind Lil and yanking her mind back to the weighted cards. Palpitations skyrocketed beneath her sternum, thumping hard and fast. She turned to the Captain's words for comfort.

 _Fear in large doses is poison. Embrace it, but do not let it control you. Remember._

"That does not mean we are incorruptible. The pull of weak-minded ideals is an inherent flaw in our humble composition."

Zeroes drew the _4_ of Flasks. He passed the rest to Forty, her fingers hesitating as she slid a card free. Relief spilled down her shoulders and she turned the card for the squad to see, just as the others had done. The _6_ of Sabers.

Then it was on to Nines.

Lil couldn't manage a happy thought for Forty, not now. In this moment, out under the eyes of their brothers and sisters, they weren't friends. They weren't even comrades. None of them could afford to think of each other that way – not until all of this was over. Each of them had to be considered an enemy – and you couldn't feel bad for enemies.

"We can – _we must_ – resist. At times, we must be reminded of what happens when we allow ourselves to yield."

Something nudged Lil's shoulder, bringing her focus back. Nines held the remaining three cards out to her. It was hard to swallow past the thorns in her throat. She turned the top card over, fighting to keep her expression in check.

She'd drawn the Idiot – a _0_.

She'd passed.

Showing her card, she offered Sharp the last two. For a moment, she thought a grimace touched the corners of his mouth. He'd looked like that since Slip had been hit on Jakku. Hadn't spoken, either. Maybe he never would again.

Maybe he would be the one to serve Eight-Seven's sentence.

"One weak link is all it takes."

Lil's gut dropped as he showed his card and her left hand tightened. She wasn't ready for this. _Don't think don't think don't think_. Sharp held out the last card to El-Tee, their squad leader. He took it, each movement measured and deliberate as he bent to place it on the snow peppered durasteel flooring. It was face out, revealing a tall black tower. The Evil One, _-1_.

Chance's chosen.

Nines moved first, a fist cracking into El's jaw. He fell, half turned to a knee, hand bracing himself against the floor – before Sharp's boot crunched hard across the side of his face. El thumped onto his back, blood spurting from his mouth. The squad converged on him, striking wild and without restraint, all training and discipline abandoned. The Captain would know if they held back.

El didn't defend himself, even though they all knew he could – knew how easy it would be for him. All he could do was writhe and twist under the whirlwind of fists and feet. Lil wished she'd had a blaster, so she could've sent a bolt boiling through his skull. Her hand longed for the hilt of a vibro-dagger, so she could've severed the nerve clusters at his neck. Anything so he wouldn't have to suffer so much.

But this was the way it had to be. Their bare fists rupturing blood vessels and fracturing bones. An example had to be made and a price had to be paid. Eight-Seven had been apart of their squad. He was their responsibility.

Presiding over the Decimation on the landing platform's elevated deck was the General and his command staff. He watched with a stiff jaw and eyes the color of frozen water, callous, even bored. The other Stormtroopers, garbed in their thermal weave and white plastoid, didn't flinch, didn't turn their heads away. El's stifled shouts and the crunch of skin meeting skin were the only sounds.

Lil's right hand cracked one of his ribs, driving it into a lung – he started to choke. That was okay. She wasn't actually doing this to him. She was just watching another visor-cam, like in training. This was another soldier's fists making welts and bruises. This wasn't her.

It wasn't her.

Lil had seen Decimations when she was younger. The smooth, cold walls of fortified duracrete protecting the Order garrison on her homeworld were the tallest things in the galaxy to her. It was her fifth year and she was packed into the courtyard with the three-hundred other trainees of the 343rd Battalion, stiff at attention.

"Today is a special day," Chief Iona, regarding them with her one good eye, had said. "Today you will see what happens to soldiers who fail to uphold the Order's standards."

Ten squads of Imperial troopers stood out of armor, each aligned in rings. Some of them wore brave faces, while others fidgeted and threw about nervous glances. _These are Stormtroopers?_ She had wondered, never once seeing them without their gleaming battle plate, many marred with the scars and scorches of combat. Only a year ago she had been convinced they were droids, the sound of their helmet-filtered voices only adding credence to this childish view.

She saw ten of them bleed and break and scream that day.

Lil couldn't recall what they had done to warrant such a sentence, teeth the size of a space slug's ripping at her innards at the sight of their listless eyes and busted faces. Chief Iona thought it was only fair, so she did too. If those troopers didn't want to be decimated, they should have done better, right? They should have done better.

At least they'd been given stones to bludgeon their comrades with. This time, Third Squad of K Company, 343rd Battalion, was given nothing. Lil's knuckles split open, raw sinew tearing to reveal the rolling joints beneath, warm blood spattering her arms. She was actually glad the cold was there to numb her pain receptors. It was a small mercy.

A hand snatched her arm in an iron grip, where Nines stood beside her, jaw set. El wasn't moving anymore, an unrecognizable heap of bloated skin – splotched with wet, seeping masses of hemorrhaging tissue, which had already started to clot and ooze with red. This broken thing wasn't El. He didn't have a skull that caved in just over his right eye, or split lips, or cheekbones bulging with yellow-green bruises.

El didn't look like that at all.

Back at the garrison on her homeworld, the officers had looked upon their nascent recruits fondly, taking great pleasure in asking, "What did your daddy do for the war?"

A conversational sort of thing, done by a people who's way of life had been swept out from under them, clinging to what little remained of their shattered culture. Lil was four when they had all been taught about the Old Empire's grand Legions and the roles their families had played in the Galactic War, told to take pride in this heritage. For they held the future of a generation on their shoulders.

"He was in the Navy!"

"Mine was in the two-hundred and seventy-third Infantry Division!"

"My daddy was a Tie Fighter Mechanic!" she would shout, so very proud, big toothy grin and all. None of them ever knew their parents, of course. The Order took them right from the medcenter they were born in, housing them and raising them in the garrison base. Lil wanted to imagine her blood-father would be proud of her, like she was of him, wishing not for the first time she knew what his face looked like. She didn't feel so proud right now, standing over El and trying to remember what he had looked like just a moment ago. Amidst the popped blood vessels slowly staining his eyeballs red, she could still see the remnants of his green irises, subdued and once thoughtful. His oaken hair was sticky and matted with gore that turned it into a muddy brownish-red. His pointed nose was a lump of crushed cartilage and his square jaw had been broken in three places, pushing the bone against the skin.

Lil looked up as every scrape and cut began to weld itself to memory, burning themselves into her senses. She didn't want to remember him that way. The other Corps were as statues, the rest of FN down range. How she wished she could be in their position, unable to bring those thoughts to heel. She would give anything to be standing where they stood.

 _To be a soldier is to be strong. To be strong is to abandon empathy. Remember._

Lil understood why this was right, why they deserved this. So why did she feel so heavy? Why did it sting so much? She yearned for the hard edges of her blaster rifle. To be enclosed within the thick, familiar weight of her armor, where she was safe. Where no one could see her.

A burlap bag scuffed at their feet, thrown by Phasma. Her shoulder cape floated in the light winds, while her head turned to gaze towards the thin, leafless trees beyond the staging area. Forty tugged at the band holding her hair up in regulation order, letting amber locks tumble down her neck. She reached down and slung the burlap sack over her shoulder, steely eyes gliding over the Captain's chrome helm before forging a path ahead. The troopers parted, giving them a wide birth, a disease following them now – a black, stained aura threatening to infect anyone who got too close. Nines touched a hand to Lil's arm, following behind the others as they made for the treeline.

Lil risked a glance at the General, a shadow with a mask lurking somewhere behind him – a shadow she'd heard whispers about in the barracks. A shadow she feared more than any nightmare.

If El were here, she wouldn't be so afraid. He'd made everything warm and right when it was unfocused and gray. "Back straight, chin up soldier," he'd say, a warmth he never shared with the others pouring through his grizzly voice. It was hers.

Lil kept her back straight as they marched on, following Nines' waypoint of red hair. He looked back to where Zeroes, dark against a phalanx of white, bent down and slid something from El's upper left arm. He rose with a red band clutched in his fingers, the same one all of them wore. The whole Battalion had been bestowed the honor after putting down an insurrection on Csilla. Stitched in black was a jagged bolt of light, spearing through the body of a planet. The old mark of 24th Imperial Legion. The Lightning Legion. In the scuffle, the band had been torn down the middle where the bolt cracked.

They left El there on the cold durasteel, the floor beneath him painted with swathes of crimson. The Stormtroopers watched them go, banished for the night out in the wilderness beyond the warm bunkers. They did not march in rank and file or exchange salutes, allowed to be shattered as they trudged through the snow, the cold seeping into their calves and splintering like icehooks through their skin. They would return in the morning, hardened and ready to return to duty.

The assembly was soon left behind, the comforting rigidity of Starkiller base and its ordered halls lost beyond a forest of brittle pines.

"What do you mean I can't ever go back home?" Lil had asked her first night on the black recruitment ships, a stumbling six year old taken from the stark, echoing confines of Garrison Base 3817. The only home she had ever known. "Why can't I see Chief Iona anymore?"

She didn't cry. Even though the heat was building behind her eyes and it felt like the air was crushing her lungs. Chief Iona always told her Imperial children never cried. That was why she had been born. Her parents were Imperials – so she was better than other children. That was why she couldn't shed any tears in front of this woman with gray eyes thicker than star destroyer hulls.

She bent her knees to be level with 2501. "We are your home now," the woman said, red lips angling kindly. "We are your family. That life was to prepare you for what is to come. You are a soldier of the Order and you will be the best that we can make you."

Lil looked at the other kids in the amphitheater waiting to be addressed by their new COs. None of them cried either.

"Is it going to hurt?"

A patient nod. "Yes."

Lil saw the broken bodies from the garrison base again, gaze falling to her feet as she tried her hardest to think of something else. Maybe if Iona was here she wouldn't feel so sick.

"I miss her," she said.

The woman's smile grew a touch wider, one of her hands moving to slide a blonde lock of hair from Lil's face. "Such wanting is a natural thing. But you must leave it all behind now. You must be strong. The galaxy is only as we make it, little one. Remember."

Forty stopped them on a small rise, watched over by a jagged boulder jutting free from the white earth. They began to stomp on the snow, packing it down so it wouldn't give under the tent and their weight. The flimsy thing wasn't even a proper prefab shelter they could've bolted together in twenty minutes. Driving the anchoring stakes into the ground, they prepared for the windy night ahead. Aside from the tent, they were given a heat generator and a handful of rations, just enough for nutrients. Lil's belly grumbled for more. No medical supplies either. Her busted knuckles would remain blistered until tomorrow. It was only fair. At least she hadn't ripped off two finger nails like Sharp.

No one talked, gathering in their small synthetic prison to preserve warmth. Lil didn't want to sit just yet. She wanted the cold. Wished it would eat away at her and become one with the gnawing nothingness in her stomach.

Sixer was by the boulder, scraping at the stone. She trudged to stand next to him, arms wrapped over her chest. With his knees plunged into the snow, sitting on his feet, he seemed to have given up on trying to stay warm as well. His eyes were intent as the pointed rock in his hand gouged shallow, scratchy lines into the boulder's rust colored surface.

"What is that?" she asked, bending her knees.

"A symbol for Manda," he said and she quirked her head. Maybe it would look like something from a different angle. The stone made jagged arcs, forcing a small oval to take shape within a large circle, triangles poking out from the center. It made her think of a star. "Some Clones used to believe it was where they went after they died."

 _Clones_. The perfect soldiers, bred from the DNA of nomads famous for their expertise in the art of war. The foundations that had formed the basis for the Imperial Legions. Day after day they had been made to watch the combat footage scavenged from visor-cams of the 501st, shown what real soldiers were capable of out on the field. What was expected of them.

No one ever said anything about Manda. Had they really believed that? Why? Was it anything like the Sleeping Star Chief Iona had used to talk about? Those places weren't for soldiers. They couldn't be.

Instead, she asked, "What's it like?"

Sixer cast her a glance, even summoned a weak smile. "I'll let you know when I get there."

Lil fought a grimace. "Do you think that's where El-Tee is?"

"I don't know."

Then where was he? Only an hour ago he had been warm and alive and right. _He's gone,_ her brain said, the part that had witnessed a decade's worth of death. The part that had watched her fellow trainees writhe in a heap on the floor under the merciless tutelage of their trainers. The part that had been made to beat her squadmates senseless at only seven years old during their CQC lessons. Blood was just a bodily fluid that transported nutrients and oxygen to the cells. Muscles were just bundles of fibrous tissue that allowed the body to maintain form. She was no more disturbed to see them spill or twist than she was to breathe.

So why did the galaxy feel so warped now? Death was her art and her profession. She reveled in that skill, the ease at which she moved with the tempo of combat. How _right_ it felt.

The snow crunched behind them, followed by a familiar voice. "What's the matter with you?"

Before either of them could wonder, Three-Eight's large hands grabbed Sixer, turning him around and pinning him against the rock.

"It's just a drawing Three," he said, hands touching her wrists, more in placation than an attempt to free himself.

Three's round features scrunched, slanted eyes narrowing. "That's the kind of dreg that made Eight-Seven fracked in the head. You thinking of skipping out on us too, Six? Maybe it was you we should've beat down out there instead?"

Lil moved to grab her, but one of Three's fists swung out to smash into her cheek. She stumbled, keeping herself upright, hands curling.

"Corporal," Forty barked, standing at the open flaps of the tent, trying to hold herself tall, but too weary to dole out reprimands. Three winced, muscles writhing for control and eyes flashing with resentment.

"It was Eight-Seven's fault... El-Tee died because of him," Lil said, not knowing where the strength in her voice had gone, searching desperately for the real Three-Eight. This wasn't her. This trooper was on edge, wounded... _frightened_. Had she died out on the platform with El?

Three-Eight let Sixer go, her glare pinning him to the pillar instead. "Lock it down, Six," she said, the fight gone from her. "Next time they'll be coming to get you for reconditioning... and I won't let you run away."

His eyes widened. Just the mention was enough to make him shiver – and not from the cold. Lil didn't know what they did to the Stormtroopers sent down to the Cages. Rumors traveled through the Corps, uttered in hushed tones. Troopers coming back with a glassy look in their eyes, staring at their squadmates like they didn't recognize them. Lil didn't want to imagine what could turn troopers into little more than walking corpses.

Three stalked off towards the tent, Sixer touching his throat and staring after her. Lil wasn't paying much attention as Forty ordered them in, stuck on the mark of Manda fresh in the stone. Beneath it, he'd carved something else –

 _LT_ _2117_.

"Come on, Little," he said, brushing her bare shoulder with his. She had always been the shortest one in their squad, also the youngest by a year, right behind Eight-Seven. He'd never called her Lil. Said Oh-One like everybody else. It sounded like no-one. She hadn't minded. Sergeants weren't supposed to give other troopers names. Let the squad do what it wanted, they had to be the example, like El-Tee.

Lil shuffled inside the tent with Sixer, the others huddled around the heater. It didn't produce nearly enough for seven bodies. She folded up inbetween Nines and Sharp, Zeroes on the other side of him. Knees hugged against her chest, she could see El's dried blood still on her knuckles. Some of it was hers, too, she knew. Their life cells intermingled to become one, intimately joined together in his moment of death. The moment she had helped deliver.

"I'm going to kill him, Lil," Nines said, the subdued quiver in his voice calling her attention. He stared down at the heater, stealing its warmth to fuel the fire in his blue eyes, alive and frenzied with an intensity that made her want to shrink.

"I swear... I'm going to **kill** Eight-Seven."

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Originally posted over at the Jedi Council Forums for a writing challenge. I'll be making the attempt to explore First Order Stormtrooper life, as well as the consequences of raising children to be soldiers. This takes place immediately after FN-2187's escape and will continue through the 3-5 days that elapse during Episode VII.

Feel free to leave comments/criticism. It's weird doing a cast of mostly OCs, with numbers for names no less, so I'd appreciate some feedback on that.

Just in case you didn't know, FN-2199 (Nines) FN-2000 (Zeroes) and FN-2003 (Slip) are all Canon characters introduced in the Before the Awakening comic. 2199 is also the "Traitor!" trooper fan-dubbed TR-8R. Neat.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

The air felt wrong without El-Tee and Slip there to breathe it with them.

It had almost been easy to forget the latter was dead in the wake of their Decimation. Now it came barreling back in the form of a cold durasteel capsule, and a part of her knew she should have been ashamed that he'd left their thoughts so quickly. Though she couldn't speak for everyone.

Three-Eight hadn't liked FN-2003 much. But Three-Eight didn't really like anybody, except maybe Sixer, and even that had reached its limit. All the same, Slip had been apart of their squad and Eight-Seven had always looked out for him, even when the rest of them left him by his own. Lil remembered what El-Tee had promised them back in boot, when the cold had made their feet numb and the mud had practically been a second skin.

"No one gets left behind," he'd said. "Not ever."

But orders always outweighed adolescent promises, no matter who made them.

Today, in the FOS _Finalizer's_ 13th Torpedo Bay, it wasn't any of them being left behind. They stood watching as 18 long metal capsules were loaded into their respective launchers. Lil repressed a shiver as another wave of chilled, recycled air pooled into the bay, as if they were still out in the cold of Starkiller. She was glad at least they were in their dress grays – clean, sharp and decorated. Lil wanted to look her best for El-Tee, even if he couldn't see her anymore.

They were leaving him and Slip behind.

The shuddering clangs of the locking mechanisms ripped through her gut, resounding and powerful. She shifted, only just. _Back straight, chin up soldier_. The bay was already full to bursting, packed tight with most of FN Corps and a dozen other squads from TK and RC.

Captain Phasma, her uniform black as befitting an Imperial Officer, marched forward to stand before them, assuming parade rest and clasping her hands behind her back. Most of her short blonde hair was held tight beneath her cap, a colorful block of commendations taking up the left side of her jacket, while white tassels looped under her right arm and a ceremonial durasteel sword hung at her hip.

She was everything a soldier should be.

Behind her were the Junior and Senior Company Leaders, as well as the wiry, but firm frame of the Chief Battalion Commander, a dozen other commissioned officers at attention by each pod.

Phasma lifted her chin. "These flags symbolize the honorable service rendered to our noble cause," she began, gaze seeming to linger on each of them in turn. The capsules were wrapped in the blazing red of the First Order colors, the center star emblazoned in black. "With them, we commit these bodies to space, so the light of the stars may harbor them where we could not. They are the beacons of the Old Empire, where the Emperor is our refuge and our strength. He will be our guide."

"Even unto our last dying breath," they echoed the old rites.

Phasma let the time breathe. One last moment of silence. Then, she recited the fallen. "Private FN two-zero-zero-three. Corporal RC zero-three-three-five. Private RC zero-two-two-four. Private RC zero-one-one-five. Sergeant RC one-three-one-eight–"

There shouldn't have been 18 pods. Slip had been one of eight hit down on Jakku. Eight-Seven should have been standing there alongside them as they sent him and the others off, instead of giving them more brothers and sisters to mourn.

"Private RC zero-three-nine-two. Private RC zero-two-seven-nine. Private RC zero-two-seven-eight. Petty Officer Third Class Fergus Haroi. Private TK three-nine-six-three. Corporal TK five-seven-zero-seven. Lieutenant FN two-one-one-seven."

The Chief Battalion Commander's square jaw tightened as he made a rigid step forward, snapping his heels together as he bellowed, "Atten-HUT!"

Along with a hundred others, her black boots clacked together, shoulders back and arms stiff at her sides. The ship's harsh, ear-numbing electric siren blared, all too loud in the expanse of the torpedo bay.

"Salute!"

Lil's fist thumped against her chest and she brought her arm out to her periphery, elbow locked at a ninety-degree angle and palm open. The officers turned and did the same, while crewmen armed the launchers. With a muffled _thoomp_ the hollowed containers drifted off the _Finalizer's_ portside. She could see them through the open bulkheads – energy shielding flickering with power fluctuations. A moment later, the ship trembled as its eight, portside triple-barrel turbolaser turrets sent blazing beams of red into the dark – signaling the deep-space angels to gather near the fallen and keep them safe on their journey. Or so Ensign Goring had always said, hocking up spit and muttering an Alsakan prayer.

But Lil knew the truth. No matter what Sixer said.

There was no journey. No passage to another life. No Sleeping Star or Manda. El-Tee and Slip would float in those pods for as long as time would allow. Until one of them slipped into a gravity well or met a black hole eons later, lost forever.

A second volley streaked overhead. Her arm, still held up in salute, felt heavier than it should have. Was she still weary from their night out in the cold? Fatigued from the lack of rest and food? She liked to think so. She would much rather it be that than a weight she couldn't identify. An ache she couldn't explain.

The third and final volley flew, the capsules now nothing more than specks of red against the dark.

It was much like the burial they'd held over Csilla for the Stormtroopers lost to IEDs and a handful of suicide bombers. There had been more than just the 343rd lying dead in those streets. The blue-skinned Chiss – with their heavy robes and dark leathers – littered the skyways in the hundreds. She wondered how civilians, even those red-eyed aliens, honored their dead? Lil hadn't cared at the time. Hadn't been thinking about that when she was down in its war torn capital, trying to link up with her squad and the rest of K Company.

Eight-Seven had been her assigned partner for the deployment, a nasty firefight in Kuvara Sector separating them. Shrapnel had wedged itself into her helmet, burning holes through the inbuilt comlink. In the distance, the fires of the armored personnel carriers from Sevari-1 still burned, spilling black smoke over the lower residential clusters. Sevari-2, her Company's convoy, had been ambushed on the way to give them aid. Now they were clearing houses, door by door, apartment by apartment to weed out the insurrectionists. The sounds of battle rolled through the steel valleys and corridors.

Glass and wood were scattered over the dust-laden carpets inside sub-level 14, upset by the thermal detonators the Innies had set off earlier in the day. It must have been one of the first sections hit too. Light pooled in from the floors above, broken through by collapsing superstructure. Her boot met uneven terrain, squishing it under foot – accompanied by the shift of clothing and a small gasp. Lil spun, finger poised over the trigger of her blaster rifle, a blue-skinned girl caught down her sights. She cowered behind a desk, little fingers gripping its edges tight. Her red eyes, the kind that all of the alien Chiss had, sent pinpricks down Lil's spine. They were so stark in color one might think they glowed yellow at their center, as if she were looking into the bristling core of a dying star.

For a time, she held her stance. They'd been given long courses on how to deal with civilians, had the protocols and scenarios drilled into their brains through tests and flash-learning. All of it abandoned her in a single moment. Until now, the blue-skins had just been faceless enemies. A threat to be put down. Even this alien's shadow-gem black hair, disheveled and slick against her skin, couldn't still the quivering sickness in Lil's stomach. It was those eyes without irises. Their faded yellow cores darted down.

Risking a glance, Lil bent her knees, keeping her rifle up. Under her foot was a small thing of colored fabrics, stuffed with cotton. She gathered it up in one hand, a thumb brushing off the black soot her boot had carried inside. All the while her mind shot neurons rapid fire trying to recall the name of the object. Different words came – person, girl, toy – but she knew those weren't right. Good enough substitutes, without giving voice to its true identity in her language.

"Mine," the girl mumbled, fidgeting behind the desk and keeping a wary red eye on the blaster.

Lil turned the thing in her hand. _What are you?_

"Doll," the girl said, taking a brave step forward, hands jerking as if she might try and snatch it back. "Mine."

 _Doll_. Lil thought, relief and frustration coiling as one. She stood straight then, the light shooting through the breach in the ceiling casting the girl in a Stormtrooper's shadow – her shadow. Lil lowered her blaster, remembering when she had been that little and Chief Iona had been the one standing over her. Were dolls common? Did every little Chiss have one?

Lil's very first possession had been a dagger. They hadn't earned vibro-weapons yet. Every night she would oil it and keep it polished, never satisfied until she could see her reflection in its flawless blade. Every other Stormtrooper had one exactly like it, but that one was hers. How many other things were there in the galaxy that she didn't know the words for? That didn't have meaning or context? Lil couldn't stop the whisper that slithered over her mind, contemplating what it might be like to live among those people back on her homeworld, beyond the thick walls of the garrison base. Where blasters and warfare were something to be feared instead of being second nature.

No. She could not, did not, want to fathom what such a world would be like. It didn't belong to her. Lil tossed the doll to the girl, only to have it smack one side of the table and fall.

"No!" the Chiss squealed, making Lil flinch, her blaster up again. Wary eyes on the rifle, the girl snatched her doll close, with a stricken look that said she expected to be shot anyway. Lil wouldn't do that. Not unless she was ordered to. She couldn't imagine why that would happen – not unless the girl was strapped with a bomb or being used as a scout for a terror cell.

Adrenaline took her then – reminding her where she was and who she was dealing with. The blaster rifle was heavy and present in her hand, each ridge pressing the black underweave into her palm. There weren't any officers in her immediate zone. She didn't have to report the incident to anyone. She could just leave the girl and move to the next sector to link up with K Company. That was when her motion sensors flared, an IFF pinging over her HUD. Foe. Left.

Lil turned, a shadow peeking around the stairwell – she was too slow. The _twang_ of his blaster rang out, a shot flying wild and punching against the side of her armor. She staggered, wood and glass shattering as her back met with shelving. Reflex ruled her, two shots from her rifle blasting into the Innie's chest and throwing him against the wall in a sizzling heap.

Lil checked herself, hand grazing the warped plastoid along her side where the bolt had bounced off. She might not be so lucky if it had been a direct hit. That was when she noticed the other body, much smaller than the one she had just bolted down. The girl's back was facing her, a bit of silvery smoke rising languidly above her. Lil stumbled forward, touching the alien's shoulder. Her body sagged, crimson eyes wide open, the doll still clutched in her hands. The wayward bolt had plowed into her chest, blasting away skin and melting the muscle to pulp, while burning it all to a rancid crisp in the same second.

Lil stood.

Her hands were shaking and her arteries were wound so tight it was hard to breathe. She told herself it was from the adrenaline. With the crunching of glass beneath her boots, she debated several times over leaving and, eventually, she did. Not without taking the doll with her. It didn't seem right to leave it.

The memory became distant then, far away like the coffins of her squadmates. There had been fire, desiccated streets, a blaster bolt or two narrowly missing her as she marched on in a daze. Eight-Seven had found her then, and everything was vivid once more. She knew it was him because of that easy gait of his, more broad-shouldered than any of the others.

He knocked on his helmet. _Comms?_

In response she put a fist up next to her visor, fingers flicking out. _Busted_ _Transponder._

 _Status?_ He asked, by way of touching two fingers to his neck and tapping.

She thumped her fist against her chest plate two times. _I'm okay_.

That was when he caught sight of the doll wedged into her belt and she could see the hesitance in the way his body jerked ever so slightly and they way his helmet lifted, almost in askance. Carefully, he reached for the doll, tugging it free and setting it down on the rubble-strewn walkway.

"I won't tell," he said, breaking projector-silence just that once.

Eight-Seven, more than any of them, had taken El-Tee's words to heart.

 _No one gets left behind. Not ever._

She wondered if they'd buried that girl, or launched her into space. Or if she'd been forgotten, like the doll Eight-Seven had left in that brutalized city block. Why did it bother her so much now?

Beyond the torpedo bay, the capsules had faded from view completely, her comrades lost in the stars. The assembled were allowed to rest at ease.

"Stormtrooper is not just a name," Phasma said, a note of pride stirring in her. "It is a lineage. When our ancestors first spread to the stars from Coruscant, it was the Legions of Zhell that fought in the name of human kind. Coruscant was an ash-ridden, volcanic world, creating vast storms of shadow that lasted for days, even weeks. Thus the very first Stormtrooper Legions were born, though they lived by a different name. Since then, we have weathered the storm so that our people, our galaxy, might know peace and prosperity. Weather the storm."

"Weather the storm," they echoed.

It hadn't been storming on Csilla. At least not with rain or thunder, but ash carried far and wide by black plumes of smoke, like ancient Coruscant, pushing it into the gray spreads of cloud above. The wisps of snow drifting in from the jagged mountains encircling Csaplar had settled in the gaps of her armor, making the suit work just a little harder as they marched through the Palace District. At the head of their column TK Corps sang of a girl named Arwen and the sweetness of her heart and how she was missing her soldiers marching far, far away.

Csilla was thrown under martial law that day. Lil remembered she had bolted a man in fine robes, a politician or some such, for grabbing onto an officer. None had offered resistance after that.

The collection of worlds and systems that called itself the Chiss Ascendancy had fallen victim to infighting and political backstabbing. Now, in the aftermath of their civil war, they were little more than a fragile alien conglomerate, too caught up in their inter-house squabbles. Too weak to offer opposition to the _Outlanders_.

Their Cabinet and Parliament was in tatters, their grand keeps little more than smoldering ruins, along with the noble families that had called them home. The very first targets of the Chiss terror cells. Even the backbone of their prided Expansionary Defense Force had been broken by rebellious kin. For the 343rd, the next few weeks were spent on long patrols through the city, rounding up civilians that met criteria for the Labor Force. Algorithms running through their HUDs highlighted the ones the Enforcers wanted.

The General vowed his forces would remain on Csilla until order was restored, decrying the Republic's attempts at calling the Senate for action against them. Documents and treaties were forged, the old Empire's agreements with the Chiss called upon to offer validation. Diplomats would officially declare that, in an act of desperation, the leading Houses on Csilla had called upon the First Order for aid in their time of crisis.

The Corps knew that wasn't true. The fleet had been waiting, watching, at the edge of the system for weeks prior. The standby order had been maddening. To the point the lot of them had slept in the hangars, ready the very second word came down to launch.

What became of the distant planet now, Lil couldn't say. She had felt only pride when the blue and white citation was pinned to her uniform collar. It didn't shine quite the same on the _Finalizer_ as it had on Csilla. Nor did the mark of the Lightning Legion grip her upper sleeve quite so tight. She was a poor fit for such a grand legacy now.

The Corps were dismissed and steadily began to file out into the ship's wide corridors. Forty had them wait until they were one of the last squads out. None of them needed to ask why, the hard looks from the rest of FN were enough. Eight-Seven had dishonored the entire Corps and cast the General's Stormtroopers in doubt. Even though the Decimation was meant to absolve them, it would be a long time before the stain of Eight-Seven's betrayal was washed away, if at all.

Forty, checking her chrono, led them back to quarters, shared with the rest of K Company. A handful of troopers from first squad were there, conversation quieting as soon as they entered. Their eyes followed third squad as they moved to their bunks, shrugging out of their dress grays and into combat fatigues. Silently, first squad took their leave, no longer content to share the same space.

"Home, sweet home," Zeroes muttered, looking to his squadmates, but no one had anything to say. Not even Three-Eight, who was always ready to offer derision. Sharp, toying with the knife that never left his side, maintained his vow of silence. Lil would have liked to hear his voice.

The air between them was thin, as if it had been sucked out into the vacuum with those 18 capsules. It didn't feel right without the others there to breathe it with them.

She wondered if it ever would.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Honestly, I don't think I'm all that happy with this installment. It was meant to have a much longer second half to it to change up the pace a little, which I've been having a frustrating amount of trouble ironing out. So, I figured since it's been _two months_ since I updated this, I may as well submit what I have for chapter 2 all polished up.

My sincerest thanks for reading!

Also, if you need more Stormtrooper-related reading material, please take a look at **_Horror Vacui_** by _**FurLicker**. _ It's a fantastically tragic story that does not have the recognition it deserves.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

Lil had witnessed the Captain's temper only once, back in boot when they were just cadets. The woman had taught them much over those seven years, long lessons punctuated with the hardness of her fists and the skin-searing burn of the trainers' electric batons.

She was hard, but she was fair.

They always stood just a little taller when she entered the field during exercises, and saluted just a little sharper when she left. Lil had overheard the trainers joking when they were confident she was beyond earshot, calling her the "Mother of the Stormtrooper Corps".

There were no hidden smirks or stifled chuckles from the trainers while Phasma had the 343rd lined up by their bunks for inspection. Lil had been fourteen, on the cusp of graduation, and brimming with a barely tamed apprehension as the Captain perused their quarters.

They were not allowed possessions of their own, nothing that did not suit the lifestyle of a soldier. Should anything that did not belong be found among their lockers or in their rucksacks, punishment would be severe. Lil could still remember how her heart had stopped along with the clap of Phasma's boots, right at the bunk next to hers. She saw the girl's throat twitch, but remained at attention, eyes forward as the Captain bent – and plucked something silver from beneath Twenty-Six's pillow.

"What is this?" she asked, voice somehow soft despite the projector. She held it before the cadet by its leather string, letting the pendant twirl under her fingers.

Twenty-Six swallowed again. "Izax, the Devourer, ma'am."

"A god of the Old Way?" Phasma asked, slowly wrapping the string up in her hand.

"Yes, ma'am."

It was a few sturdy welds of metal that came together in the shape of a double-edged sword. Lil couldn't fathom where she had gotten it. The Captain's hand wandered down to Twenty-Six's face, gloved fingers gliding absently along her cheek.

"Tell me, one-nine-two-six," she said, her helm quirking just so. "Was it by the grace of this intangible deity that you are here? Because... if they are a god as you believe, a being of real and true power, then surely they would hold your life in their hands this very moment? Surely, a god could decide on a whim whether or not you live or die?" her fingers lowered, pendant pressing into Two-Six's skin as Phasma's hand settled around her throat. "And if that is so, then tell me, who is it that holds your life in their hands now?"

She did not squeeze. She waited until Twenty-Six's nerves got the better of her, until the cadet couldn't help but look up into the Captain's starless black visor. Her fingers twitched, applying the barest amount of pressure.

" **I** am your god, and the Order is your religion," she said, at first no louder than a whisper. "I give you knowledge and shelter and purpose. Where else would you be but whoring in a cantina or slaving in the Republic's city-cores or subject to _a thousand other crueltie_ s?! The galaxy – the Stormtrooper Corps – is as **I** make it."

Twenty-Six gasped as Phasma's hand withdrew, releasing her airways, which for a moment had been gripped all too tight. The cadet fought to stay standing, sucking bacta-scented air into her lungs, her own much smaller fingers twitching, but never rising to touch the redness around her neck.

"Am I not merciful?"

No one had anything to say to the contrary. There were many Majors and Commanders in the First Order, and the ever watchful retainers of the Supreme Leader. All he, or any officer, had to do was ask and they would give their lives for the Order. But from then on it was known to all that the Stormtroopers, in reality, belonged to Phasma.

She was hard, but she was fair.

Much like that day, Lil feared she would see the Captain's calm break as they stood at attention in one of the Finalizer's aft corridors. She touched the back of her palm across her mouth to sweep away the blood trickling free and realized, too late, that her knuckles had split open again, smearing red across her cheek. TK-651's lips quirked in the briefest of smirks, gone as the Senior Storm Leader regarded him and his unit, pressed at attention against the corridor wall opposite Lil, Nines, and Three-Eight. They were still breathing hard, falling back on old lessons to dampen the pulse of adrenaline.

The Storm Leader paced and, despite his slick-back hair and freshly shaven chin, was anything but collected. His fingers, held together behind his back, twitched while a sheen of sweat on his forehead shimmered under the glaring light. The insignia over his heart marked him as belonging to FN Corps, responsible for leading some platoon with a Lieutenant as his Officer Aspirant. Unofficially referred to as Second Storm Leaders, like El-Tee. It was no one she recognized, and his second was absent, leaving the Senior Storm accountable for any perceived bias towards them in the official reports.

Lil's heart shivered as Captain Phasma marched around the corner, shoulder cape whipping at her side. There was not an urgency to her step, nor was it lax. Each footfall was deliberate, in a measured stride that only seasoned soldiers could manage. That aura filled every edge and plate of her chrome armor, making the woman appear taller than the Storm Leader, even though he stood a full head higher.

Their heels snapped together, right arms up in salute. The Leader even gave a slight bow, which Phasma waved off, and they stood at ease.

"Report."

The Leader puffed his chest out and swallowed. "I intercepted these two squads fighting, Captain, and after questioning," Lil caught his glance at TK-651, "I was unable to determine the instigator. FN two-one-three-eight claims that TK-six-nine-eight initiated physical contact with hostile intent, while he and his squadmates confess that it was the opposite. Two-one-three-eight's record notes previous offenses... but I thought the matter best left to your discretion."

Phasma's gaze drifted and Lil kept her own forward, imagining her eyes were blasters and 651's head was her target. She was certain even a brain-dead Rancor could put two and two together, and Lil sensed the Captain had already made her decision before the Storm Leader had even spoken. Arms crossed, she strode before the length of the TK squad. Most of them were older than even the Captain herself, but age meant nothing in the Stormtroopers Corps.

"This is not the Imperial Army – and I do not tolerate petty squabbling between my soldiers... I think a stay with the Sanitation Section will be a better use of your squad's _abilities_ , don't you agree, TK-six-five-one?"

Lil allowed herself the barest spark of glee, refraining from returning the man's smirk from earlier. Impressively, he didn't scowl. "Yes, Captain."

"Dismissed," she said the word as though it were something distasteful and they saluted, before turning on their heels and marching in line down the hall. The Storm Leader visibly relaxed. One of the taller TKs passed her, cobalt eyes glinting as they lingered.

"Be careful out there, _Tinny_ ," he said.

TK Corps was of the old breed, vets of the disbanded 97th Imperial Legion – the last Legion to keep fighting, even after the Empire's disastrous defeat at Jakku. "Victorious" was their motto. Most were in their fifties and played fast and loose with regulation. They didn't talk much to the younger Corps, but deigned to offer them a variety of pet names under the Order's new regime. Tinny was their favorite, supposedly started by some old veteran of the Clone Wars who'd once called the new wave of recruits "Hux's Tin Soldiers".

That was nothing new. Lil was used to not being liked.

The Captain regarded them. "Report to your Storm Leader," she said and with a salute, they turned to fall out. "FN-two-five-zero-one. Remain."

Lil stopped mid-step and put herself at-ease before the Captain. Nines went rigid, his bright, burning eyes set almost imperceptibly wider than usual, his jaw clenching in that way it did when he was anxious. The jerking pause lasted only a moment as he kept in stride behind Three-Eight, though she could hear the reluctance in his slowed footfalls.

The Captain strode back the way she'd come and Lil followed, down the corridor and up several decks, to TacWar Room 1. Her black-tinted reflection met her in the lone oval table, white light from narrow strips near the base of the obsidian walls pushing shadows over her eyes and shoulders. For the Captain, standing on the opposite side of the table near the ribbed view port, the reflections made her armor glow as if forged of moonlight.

Lil held herself at attention, before the Captain waved a hand, signaling rest. Tickling tremors rushed through the ship's durasteel frame, and she tried not to think about how she could feel the destroyer ever so subtly adjusting its course beneath her feet.

"You hesitated," Phasma said, cloak rustling as she shifted away from the view port.

"Ma'am?"

She tapped her helmet. "I have reviewed the recordings from the security monitors. You made a number of non-lethal strikes." she leaned forward to touch fingers with her image in the table, armor creaking. "A soldier that cannot kill is as useless as a jammed blaster."

Lil recalled leaving the living quarters with Nines and Three-Eight. Remembered a TK throwing a shoulder into her as he passed, and how Three-Eight had slugged him for it. There had been seven of them and her mind had raced through training scenarios – where to strike first, where her opponent would suspect it least, where each blow would inflict the most damage. Her body had betrayed her, hesitating to hit pressure points, crush weak cartilage or snap fragile bones.

Just the memory made her knuckles scream with fire.

"I'm fine, Captain," she said, the pain quickly turning into a cold, reaching fear – as if someone were pushing carbonite coated fingers into her lungs. They were going to recondition her. She was going to be sent down to the Cages and after they were done Sixer wouldn't talk to her anymore and Nines wouldn't sit close enough so their elbows and knees could touch. She wouldn't even remember their faces.

A reflection of her, a hazy visage that had only yesterday beaten her squad leader to death, thought that might not be such a bad thing.

The Captain straightened, grabbing her helmet with both hands and giving it a slight twist. Air hissed as it lifted and she tucked the helm between an arm and hip.

"Do you know about the Liberation of Chagar Nine?" she asked.

Lil paused. It was an old conflict, during the Civil War. "Part of a campaign to uproot criminal syndicates from Outer Rim territories."

"Correct, and do you know what the Rebel Alliance called it?"

"No, Captain."

Phasma turned back to the view port, the light shifting. "To them, it was known as the Rape of Chagar, and that is because they never bothered to understand what it was like before the Empire came. To them, we marched on a sovereign world and subjugated its people after tearing down its government and reforming its laws under ours. In reality, it was a world overflowing with suffering. Blistered and bleeding cities bloated with the swelling puss of squalor and death and injustice. It was famous in the underworld for its arenas, where countless people spilled one another's blood for the entertainment of wealthy alien crime lords."

The Captain's pale blonde hair was disheveled just so on one side, a milky aura bouncing off her cheeks and subduing the fleshy pink of her lips. She was Captain and soldier and woman, garbed in shimmering battle plate, and Lil felt something nameless stir within her. It was something like pride, but twisted with wanting.

She forced it down, tucked it away under training and discipline, and listened.

"When the Empire arrived, the arenas were demolished, the crime lords charged and executed, and their legions of slaves set free. The Empire gave the people of Chagar peace, gave them choice. And yet the Rebels had the audacity to call it something so terrible as a _rape_. That is the great evil of the Republic. They confuse chaos for freedom. They confuse order with oppression. People need order. Without it, they are little better than packs of Rakghouls."

Lil had grown up learning about the many atrocities committed by the Alliance, who had become so numerous and so merciless that the only way to subdue them was to destroy their planets and the people that harbored them. Just as the First Order did not suffer traitors, neither had the Empire.

There was power in each of Phasma's carefully chosen words, and each of her subtle movements. Standing there over the black surface of the table and against the view port, even the stars seemed to dim in comparison. If gods had ever been real, then surely this is what they must have looked like. Lil wondered if Phasma really thought of herself as a god, or if she claimed the title to mock those who worshiped them.

It did not really matter. She was first and foremost, like all of them, a soldier. But Lil noticed her light dimming, though it must have been a trick of the eye. Whatever it was, the Captain's sharp, intelligent gray eyes became unfocused and far away.

"I was there," she said, standing on a planet Lil could not perceive, in a star system she did not know. "When they signed the peace treaty. When the Empire was splintered and disgraced. I waited ten long years, watched and listened as the people mocked our triumphs and spat on our sacrifices. How they paraded in the streets, tearing down our memorials and desecrating the graves of our fallen."

Very slowly, the Captain settled her helmet back on, seals squealing as her suit re-pressurized. A planetary weight pressed atop her shoulders and to Lil the cape seemed less a symbol of status and rank, but more a promise. A burden.

"That must never be allowed to happen again," Phasma said, turning to face her once more and stepping around the table to be within a foot of her. "That is why you are what you are. A Stormtrooper of the First Order. That is why your Decimation was necessary. It is to remind you, to remind your brethren, what will happen to our people if the Republic is allowed to endure... and the price we all must pay to keep that from becoming a reality. Do you understand?"

Phasma did not dismiss her, nor did she depart, but held her there in the visor of her helmet. Lil saw herself where the Captain's eyes would be, and her nose and her lips, while that feeling of pride and wanting boiled up from her stomach and seared beneath her sternum.

"Yes, Captain."

Lil navigated the _Finalizer's_ halls on her own after that – and hated every minute of it. Officers passed, hands clasped behind their backs and paces brusque. They did not notice her steadily making her way along with handfuls of others, yet her skin crawled as armored Stormtroopers marched by. Though she couldn't see past their visors, and had no reason to believe they were looking her way, she felt their eyes on her all the same.

She found third squad where she knew they would be: down in the mess hall, where Nines sat a little straighter upon catching sight of her. Around them were rows and rows of narrow tables, occupied by troopers and crew alike. Still she felt eyes on her.

Lil thumped her chest twice as she sat across from Forty and beside Nines, their curious looks falling back to their meals. She did not move to get herself food from the dispensers along the wall, nor did anyone offer her anything.

"We should be on assignment," Nines said to none of them in particular, words nearly lost under the bustle of the mess hall.

Forty stabbed at her nutrient brick. "Not with the Starkiller's firing slated for twelve-hundred."

"Thought the egg-heads were still polishing it?" Zeroes asked.

Forty shrugged. "Command says it's ready."

"What's the target?"

"Does this look like a briefing?" she snipped, fixing him with a glower. Zeroes held her stare until she shifted her elbows and went back to her tray. "Key-off and eat."

Her way of telling them to cut the chatter. "Quit breathing into the mic," El used to say, often after a quip from Sixer. He was farthest from her, down to the right by Sharp, who glared at any trooper that let their attention linger too long. Three-Eight had put herself next to Forty and had not said a word to Sixer since they'd come down from the hills on Starkiller.

Once, Lil might have thought that Sixer and Three-Eight were born brother and sister. She used to get jealous some times when they'd be off on their own, separated from the squad and whispering to one another. Lil could not put a time or a place to it, but one day they had simply not been so close anymore.

Nines slid his tray to her, a quarter portion of his nutrient brick left. She poked the spongy, steamed seeds, eating even though her stomach had folded in on itself.

"So, where to boss?" Sixer asked.

Three-Eight looked ready to deliver a scathing remark, but Forty only nudged her head to the turbo-lifts. "Training," she said, standing. "Nothing else to do until we reach geosynchronous orbit anyway."

Lil had never known the training deck to be anything less than a constant hive of activity. The _Finalizer_ housed 8,000 Stormtroopers who had very little to occupy their time as the star destroyer lurched through the dark matter between planets, carrying them from one deployment to the next. Training and exercise, at least, was not something done carelessly or without intent, not for most of them. To train was to hone their craft, to better pay tribute to the First Order with their service. It was sacred.

A TK battalion drilled at the far end, their cadence and the uniform slapping of their boots on durasteel dominating the deck. Other squads practiced hand-to-hand or fiddled with the gravity settings on the weights, turning the space into a symphony of indistinct shouting and ringing metal.

 _Complacency is weakness. You are never strong enough. You are never fast enough. You must always fight to be the best that you can be. Anything less is stagnation, and stagnation is death. Remember._

That had been her third lesson under Phasma, when her training had truly taken shape.

Those days had begun with pain tolerance – running uphill for miles while each squad carried a ten foot log on their shoulders bigger around than their heads. Then they would swim across the lake at the top, freezing in the elevated early morning temperatures. Once back at camp, they would fight. Not one another, but the grown, fully realized NCOs of the Stormtrooper Corps. They were not allowed to quit until the trainers said so, no matter how many times they were knocked to the ground or how much their knees wobbled trying to hold them up. The fighting itself served no purpose other than to bruise and bloody them.

At least until the trainees learned to bloody the trainers back. Lil remembered they'd stopped the exercise entirely after six Sergeants had been critically injured by their cadets.

Afternoons were spent learning squad tactics and sitting at the flash-learning terminals, studying ten-thousand years worth of warfare. The day went on to close quarters combat, exclusively with melee weapons. The knives they were given were black and dulled at the edges, pumping opponents with a few volts of electricity on contact. They'd go to bed those nights with a myriad of burns, spend a half-hour in the bacta tanks the next morning, and then do it all over again.

They were instilled with the rigorous Ailon devotion to training, who had earned a place in the Old Empire's grand history for their fearless submission to impossible odds. They were instructed in the ways of the old Imperial Guard and their Echani martial arts, the crimson that marked their clothes and painted their training bracers acting as a reminder of their forebears and their unbending loyalty. A woman without a tongue taught them the eighteen silent ways to kill honed by the Umbaran Assassins, making them commit every slice and jab of their vibro-blades to muscle memory. So too were they imbued with the fallen Sun Guard's ferocity in battle, through their expertise in gladiatorial warfare and urban combat. From a Mandalorian mercenary they adopted the brutal melee techniques of the Death Watch, mastering evisceration with their jagged switchblade gauntlets, and learning how to use the hard bones in their bodies to shatter skulls and crush knee caps.

"You will learn to kill with your hands before a blaster," he had said while they listened intently, and suddenly she was under the firm guidance of Chief Iona again. The thought made her restless in his presence, and she became determined to master each new skill he imparted. Yet there was one exercise she had looked forward to more than any of the others, where it was her pitted against her squadmates. Pressed against one another in a primal, muscle-fueled struggle for dominance, skin sweat-slick and boiling. Lil had loved fighting Nines. Tackling him, wrestling with him. Touching him. She loved being that close to him, even if she didn't entirely understand why.

They didn't wrestle anymore – though she suspected that was because he disliked losing. It was the same reason he'd always held a mild resentment towards Eight-Seven, back when they had sparred in full riot gear under the Captain.

Nines was really just a sore loser. But it was different with Eight-Seven. As they had come to settle into the roles most suited to them in the squad, a distance manifested itself between them, subtler than it was now, occupied only by empty space and betrayal. In every contest of strength they fought, the swing of Nines' arms became more feral and the tension in his face more maddened.

For years Nines had been trying to fight his way out of Eight-Seven's shadow. It was a rivalry, one their trainers had supported with honest zeal.

"Here, wash your face." a new voice and an unfamiliar face, perhaps a few years older than her too. She looked past his outstretched arm to the blocky white numbers on his gray shirt: RC-0227. When she didn't respond, his hand was there with a cloth wet with sweat, smelling of salt and damp leather. He rubbed it over her cheek, spreading warmth across her skin as he swiped the dried blood she'd forgotten about away.

She took a step back and snatched it from him in the same movement, offering a scowl. He remained unfazed, arm lowering to his side. To Lil's right, her squadmates made use of the weights. Not even Zeroes was up for sparring.

"Your squad was in the hangars," she said, focus back on him, squared jaw and hairless head. There was a stiffness in his posture, like all she had to do was cut through his skin to find the metal underneath. Needles danced on her shoulders.

"Trigger had only been joking about getting to use the heavy blaster," he said.

Lil shifted. TK's cadence became louder. She hadn't been in hangar bay 19 when Eight-Seven commandeered that Tie Fighter, but she'd felt the tremors from its laser cannons impacting the deck. She'd watched the corpsmen haul off the singed bodies of this Stormtrooper's squadmates.

"They'll find the traitor soon," she said, perhaps to offer assurance, or to blanket the guilt third squad carried. It was not something she would normally say. She wished she hadn't.

"It doesn't matter." Two-Seven walked away, leaving a squirming nausea behind to wrap around her stomach. As though she had in some way been violated by his words and by his stare. She imagined standing on the deck as steel ruptured around her, super-heated energy melting plastoid and flesh together. Lil could still feel the press of his cloth, rough like the ripped skin of her knuckles, and could not decide which was worse.

It wasn't long before the _Finalizer_ reached geosynchronous orbit. An assembly was called and they were soon standing on the surface of Starkiller amid thousands of others, where she forgot about Two-Seven and how his fingers had brushed her cheek.

None of them needed to be told what Starkiller's target was. They had spent too many months burrowing down dark canyons and drilling deep into icy caverns, long days standing at the burning heart of the planet, not to know where Starkiller's eye looked today.

Since the mission on Jakku, her armor had been cleaned and polished, the inner bodysuit hugging every slim contour with its smooth mesh. She saw the massive landing platform through her visor again, blaster rifle resting in her hands. Beneath her boots, the spatters of blood had been washed away and around them the Order's red flags hung over every surface, surging with the ebb and flow of the winds.

The General stood before them, back straight and eyes to the horizon. "Today is the end of the Republic," he began, filling every canyon and valley with his voice. "The end of a regime that acquiesces to disorder. At this very moment, in a system far from here, the New Republic _lies_ to the galaxy while secretly supporting the treachery of the loathsome Resistance. This fierce machine which you have built, upon which we stand, will bring an end to the Senate – to their cherished fleet! All remaining systems will _bow_ to the First Order and will remember this as the **_last day_** of the Republic!"

Their fists thrust skyward and her voice joined the thunderous roar that answered him. As one, they about-faced and the planet rumbled, reverberating with the jittering anticipation felt by its soldiers. A chill ran over her as the General's words faded off the duracrete and mountain rock. This was the day the Captain had promised them. The moment she had been born for.

The General screamed the command to fire, and Lil nearly gasped as a blazing pillar of light speared into the sky, reaching into the heavens. But this was not the power of dead gods or some unseen force wielded by ignorant monks. This was the power of human kind – this was the power of their Empire.

Her neck ached as she watched, her heart shaking with pride as the first planet blossomed into a bright, fiery speck in the night.

This was the heat of a hundred lost worlds, the scream of a million Stormtroopers, of their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. The fruit borne of their Decimation.

This was their vengeance, and it burned bright still.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

"Do you know what you are?" Maja asked, bowed vocal cords giving him a scraping rasp. The cloth over his nose and mouth softened his words a bit, his eyes hidden behind the augmented reality faceplate he never removed. What he saw she didn't know, only that he occasionally plucked at the air or swiped his fingers at unseen particles.

"A soldier," Lil said, kicking her feet while so high up on the medical table. Something wasn't quite right. She didn't remember being this small moments ago. Hadn't she been sleeping?

Maja shook his head, setting one hand on her knee to stop its bouncing, the other readying the needles. They fit into an injector the shape of a slug-thrower, like the one Chief Iona had strapped to her hip. Except this gun was armed with fourteen pointed tips, each of varying sizes and each for a different purpose.

"Then you were born a soldier? Just as that?" Maja spun the cylinder at the cap of the injector for the correct point. She stared at it. He would land on the fat one.

"Yes."

He pinched the tip and locked in a needle as thick as her veins and as sharp her stomach pains. "No. What you are, first and foremost two-five-zero-one, is human."

A protest shriveled to dust in her throat as she watched Maja tap the infuser, which slid the needle back and loaded it with all of the appropriate chemicals. "You are not special in this regard. Nothing separates you in class or culture, save for minute things that come about in the mess of our reproduction." He lowered the nozzle to her elbow. As he leaned closer, his white air – combed back and reaching down to his shoulders – shone almost silver. "Because soldiers are not born," Maja said, the tip of the needle teasing her skin. "They are made."

A decay began to creep over the walls of Maja's lab. Ruddy red cracks split from the welded seams, a putrid corrosion flaking away at the sturdy plates.

Lil didn't understand. "But that's what I was born to be," she insisted. That's what they always told her – that she was brighter and harder than any crystal off distant Roon. "When the Kuat shipyards need iron," Chief Iona used to say, a glint hiding in the metal patch where there should have been an azurite eye, "they have but to draw Imperial blood."

The needle punctured deep and spilled cold fluid through her arm , freezing her from the inside stem by stem. "That does not make you one."

Shatter points began to trickle across the floor.

"So what does it matter if I'm human?"

Maja cupped Lil's jaw in his other hand. "It matters because our race is dying. Not in numbers, but in spirit," he said, gently nudging her face from side to side, as though she were an apparition conjured by his AR. "It matters because you have more potential than any mindless clone. Yes, you may have been born to serve a function, to be primed for a purpose – and you must be made resistant to all of our weaknesses – but whether or not you are capable of becoming a well polished piece of our grand machine, whether or not you remain unbroken..." he edged in very close, radiating with the subdued heat of another and wrapping her in the scent of boiled leather. "That is entirely up to you."

It was then the bulkheads crumbled to ash, dispersing into smothering clouds that floated through a forest of thin white trees, twisted and bent as though writhing in agony. Lil stood, tall and properly nineteen cycles again. She wandered, alone, toes pushing through the gentle cushion that so sweetly asked her to lie down, to sleep in its cool embers. They puffed aside with every step until she could see familiar corridors beneath her. She was both there and not there. A child but not a child. One that didn't know much beyond smooth sheets and flawless transparisteel, or the sheering iridescence of a star cutting in through their windows from light-years away. Maja watched over them from his augmented world. Ever with his needles. Ever with his tests. Lil didn't know much more than eyes like hers and the humming tables overseen by careful automatons.

That scent of boiled leather brought her back to a place deep and forgotten in her core. A dark space floating in nothingness, small and safe from the twinkling stars that bristled like jagged teeth. Even now she could see them through her warped forest.

She was not born in metal. Not like the Clones, but she was raised in it, each nerve growing accustomed to the cold, sterile touch. Each wall and bulkhead ringing with clean life and energy. It was from this place that she had her first glimpse of an unforgiving galaxy. An existence where her opposition was an ideology, a way of life that sought to strip her skin and flay her cords. A plague-riddled beast that would swallow her whole if she wasn't strong enough to deny it.

The weak.

The alien.

The thought no longer made her blood tremble. But the cold didn't comfort her anymore either, turning instead to a tingling, festering rot. One that made her want to burrow into the molding heaps of ash at her feet, away from the cold and the snow. She imagined, at least, that there she could still see El-Tee's face, like she remembered it.

Lil's world changed, shifted focus. She knew it was different – knew what roamed under her cortex was amiss. Or, rather, knew that it wasn't the blackness or teething stars. Here, she saw the doll. Knew every stitch. Could still feel the rough cloth on her thumb through undersuit mesh. Just as suddenly it was swept away as the refuse of battle had been in the aftermath of Csilla's war. El-Tee carried it by one arm. He was younger, smaller, and it dragged in the dirt behind him. Lil turned away, her armor donned, stringent veins warping underneath the plastoid as though carved by greedy maggots.

She was in Csaplar again as third squad stopped a family passing through Checkpoint Viceroy. A mother asked, in broken basic, why they were taking her son.

"Suspected compliance with terrorists," Lil answered. Not because they had any real grounds to take him or because she knew where he was going. That was just what they'd been told to say. Their HUDs flagged the ones to be taken. She wasn't the one who decided.

It wasn't her.

The mother wailed in her alien tongue as the Chiss boy was dragged off, kicking and cursing, until Slip rammed the butt of his rifle into his gut. As the Chiss doubled over, he cracked him across the head for good measure and they continued off with him half in a daze. There was a scuffle behind her and the woman's shrill screams were cut off by the report of a blaster.

"Do you ever wonder what's out there?" Eight-Seven asked, standing next to her in the barracks hall and staring into an infinite black expanse peppered with light. Lil pondered this a moment, forgetting how chilling the durasteel was on her bare feet. She never could sleep very well on the ships. They moved too much and twisted her stomach 'round.

"Like what?" she asked, a sense of unbalance tickling her legs.

"I dunno." He shrugged. "Like other people."

It was before she knew him as only Eight-Seven. What had she called him then? He peered at the expanse as one would an enemy, confused by his own question when he realized he didn't know what was in the galaxy any better than she.

"Do you think we'll ever meet them?" She asked.

He nodded and tried for a smile. "I hope so."

Lil saw the little Chiss girl then – the little doll – as she wandered Csaplar's embattled streets, where she found it at her feet, a streak of red left across it. Lil was still small then, frozen stiff despite the heat of war licking her skin. Her unseen bindings broke. She picked it up, but it fell to ash in her hands and before her was the boy thrashing as he was dragged away from his mother. The Stromtroopers holding his arms blurred to flames that swallowed him whole, the duracrete turning to sand that whipped and stung at her in the winds. All around her a village tucked between the dunes burned, bolts streaking in the dark and finding targets with breath-catching accuracy.

Slip's IFF flared yellow and just as soon flat-lined red. A bolt met the dirt at her feet, super-heated energy impacting the sand and melting it to shards of glass that shot out like a frag burst. Through the fires she saw Eight-Seven, standing over Slip. Red fingertips clawed down the side of his helmet and at his feet was El-Tee, twisted and split open – except she was standing in Eight-Seven's place now.

"Do you think we'll ever meet them?"

An armored fist slapped her upper arm.

"Rise and shine, Little."

Lil started and snatched Zeroes by the wrist, though the smirk she'd heard in his voice was still there. He yanked his hand back, or she let go, she wasn't sure. The teeth and doll still played in the lights.

Zeroes never had dreams, or so he said. Lil used to not have them either. He made that gesture all flamers used – miming the wrist twisting motion of easing on their conflagrine, thumb and index fingers out. cool down.

"An hour out?" she asked, more to speak and assure herself of realness than because she didn't know.

Zeroes nodded, rifling through something on his bunk, just above hers. "We'll be dropping out of hyperspace soon."

"Better stim up," Sixer said, already in full battledress, save for his helmet. He crossed the room and offered her an injector. Ships only made her uneasy. Hyperspace jumps made her vomit. To her right, tucked up in his bunk where a set of knives were laid out, Sharp allowed himself the ghost of a smirk. After their first deployment out of system, Lil hadn't been able to get her helmet off all the way before throwing up. One of the few times she could remember Three-Eight ever laughing.

Lil took the injector, like it was completely harmless and that she couldn't still feel its bite in Maja's hands. The image of the Chiss boy flailing in flame plowed a sickness through her gut, where it sank and settled to gurgle and ache in her intestines. Fiddling with the settings, she loaded it with a mild cocktail of stims and sank the nozzle into her elbow. gray-green liquid slithered into her bloodstream as she pulled the trigger.

"You know," Sixer said as she handed it back, glancing at Zeroes, "Onderonians say it's bad luck to wake a woman while she's dreaming."

Tension knotted the space between them. Sharp stared. Zeroes scoffed, sitting down next to her with his data-pad. The Chief Battalion Commander was from Onderon. Some said born of a royal bloodline. El-Tee had preached his phrases as if they were law.

"Why?" Lil asked.

Looking from Zeroes to her, Sixer shrugged. "I don't know." He clicked the injector to his belt, right next to the med-kit. All of them had a fresh one before each deployment, but only Sixer was certified to carry and administer stims outside the gen-meds. A corpsman attached within the squad itself instead of the whole company like the others, who could often be seen loitering about the med-bay when not in the field.

Silence took hold of their thoughts, as was becoming routine. At least it wasn't an uncomfortable one. This was the calm before battle, the ease of folding into the current again.

Sharp, with expertise and care, methodically slipped each knife into its proper sheath. He couldn't stand daggers. Had once said they didn't let you get close enough. Of the 22 silent ways to kill that Lil knew, Sharp had taught her 4. Next to her, Zeroes went over the operation outlines. They'd received the mission packets at 12:00 Starkiller time and been given a short briefing by Forty. That was eight hours ago. Lil hadn't seen Nines since, but there was only one other place he could be after their orders came down.

Standing, she thumped Zeroes on the shoulder and earned a grunt in response. At the locker built into the wall beside her bunk, she stripped and fit into the undersuit that vacuum sealed to her as a second skin might. Piecemeal, she began to fit on each armor piece, still smooth and perfect from their standard cleaning the day before. Save, at least, for one area on the inner chest plate, just along the rim where the lining had frayed a bit. She pulled it back to reveal a naked sliver of gray plastoid where, etched in basic, read: dreams full of teeth.

Armor modifications of any kind were against regulation and, if discovered, could get her flagged for reevaluation. She'd been only fourteen cycles when she had marked it, touching a finger along the grooves. Dreams didn't often come with her sleep, but she couldn't stand it whenever they did. Nothing made sense in those worlds. Everything was out of place – out of her control. And the teeth. The ripping, gnawing teeth. It had been a long time since she'd felt them.

Lil slipped her knife free and angled her wrist, not caring if the others saw her. Beside it, she wrote another message.

No teeth now. Only a little doll.

She finished gearing up, halting when the only thing that remained was her helmet, gripped in both hands. Her thumb moved to wipe away a grease smudge over the right side vents. Two-Seven's flat face flared to memory, along with the warm cloth from fingers she had expected to be cold, like hers. Should she report him? No. Third squad's name was already in poor standing. The last thing they needed to be known for was ratting out one of their own. That wasn't right, was it? His entire squad had been wiped out. Shouldn't he be reconditioned? Wasn't that what was done with broken soldiers? It was her duty to the Order, to the Supreme Leader, to report him and keep the chain strong.

Motion drew her head up, over to Sixer, who mimed putting a helmet over his head. Lil almost smirked. After the op. She'd file an official report then. She snapped her helmet in place, suit squealing as it pressurized. Auto-diagnostics ran over her HUD and patched her into the ship's local network. A private comm-line opened up.

"Oh-one, out to corridor B-nine," Forty said, then killed the freq.

The moment Lil marched out of the barracks she spotted her, sporting a crisp new red shoulder pauldron. Forty's helmet shifted as she stood at attention. Commanding "at ease," Lil set her feet apart and clasped her hands behind her back.

"I put in a request with the Storm Leader to have you assigned to Prisoner Control for the op," Forty said. She shifted the pauldron, unused to the extra weight. "It was denied, so you're on overwatch."

Support. Lil nodded. "Yes, ma'am." she shouldn't have been surprised. After the incident with TK, she was off center. The others couldn't trust her and Forty knew it. There was nothing wrong with her decision, but she still resented her for it.

Forty was always in control, even when El-Tee was still alive. He had bowed to her advice and put so much weight in her voice, which was so fond of barking orders like his. There was a tension that had coiled between them, strung taught when he, on rare occasions, ignored her counsel. Even if she was in the right, if her reasoning was more sound, more efficient. She had to be reminded who was really in command. Forty never allowed herself to be humbled by it, knowing when to ease under his pride, and when to remind him they were on even ground.

Roving over the red armor, bolted to where El-Tee had once worn it, Lil saw everything she was not. Forty's hand clapped atop Lil's helmet, where it stayed for a time. Then, with a just amount of force, she shoved her away. Enough so she would stagger a few steps back but not fall. She kept her back straight and lifted her chin as if in challenge. Lil understood.

Marching down the hall and bringing with her a whirlwind of pent up emotion, Lil could feel Three-Eight's animosity through the knotted cords sitting in each shining white plate, imbuing her visor with a smoldering glare it should not have had. As Forty stepped around her, knuckles sliding against hers, Three-Eight fell in step a pace behind.

Nines was down in the sparring rings, shallow oval depressions spaced evenly in their own corner of the training deck. He moved against an invisible opponent, strikes, steps and blocks. Catching sight of her, he beckoned her over and she hid a huff with a shrug. She entered the ring and assumed a stance. Tradition dictated they spar out of armor, but there was no time for that. As fond as she was of being face to face, muscle to muscle with her opponents, it was different with enemies. She wished they wore masks too.

The two of them sparred in the old Echani style, adopted by the Imperial Guard. Their rite of passage. It was an art of mastering the body as a weapon. To the Echani, combat was the only way to truly know someone. A pure form of expression that required no words, only muscle and raw emotion. All of the training in the galaxy was worthless unless one understood their enemy. A Commander in the time of the Mandalorian Wars once compared warfare to a game of Dejarik. Because war was about controlling your enemies, altering their perception so that they responded the way you wanted. A careful balance of manipulation and force. The simulations had taught her real combat was different, but the same lessons applied.

Manipulation and force.

The bout lasted less than two minutes. Her body didn't stutter this time, like it had against the TK squad the day before. He stepped into a blow and she parried, catching Nines in a grapple. Twisting his wrist to lock the muscles, she pivoted her hips and threw him to the ground. Her other hand pressed against his plate, where she could feel his heaving lungs. She'd played him at his own game, putting him on the defensive with overwhelming force. Nines groaned and grabbed for his shoulder. When she let him up, he sat on the floor and seemed to pout over his injury, setting an odd edge in her. He wouldn't look at her. Maybe she had thrown him a little too hard. What was wrong with her?

Stepping closer, hand reaching out – he spun and grabbed it, tossing her clear across the ring. Her armor squeaked, a fresh ache flaring up in her shoulder. Manipulation. Nines stepped forward, pleased with himself and all too smugly aware of her fury.

She gut punched him and together they made their way down to the hangars. Third squad rounded up as they passed through the inspection terminals and were allotted their preassigned weapons. They weren't allowed to carry anything but a standard issue blaster pistol and vibro-knife when off-duty.

Lined up in their respective zones, painted markers beneath their feet almost worn away from black-heeled traffic, they waited for the AALs to finish pre-flight checklists. Third squad loaded up on Carrier-8 with fifth and sixth squads. Lil felt it the moment they dragged out of hyperspace, where relativity flowed normally again, joining hands with matter and gravitational forces. Everything was put back into place, bit by bit. They sat for minutes. Her internal chrono said 19:37, Starkiller time. A stutter, then: 14:18 local, Takodana relative.

No one moved, or spoke. Each holding their blasters close to their chest plates, muzzles angled to the floor. All except the Heavies, like Three-Eight. The butt of her rifle rested between her feet, hands gripping the thick barrel like it was the only thing keeping her upright. The strap clicked against her thigh plating, the only sound other than the shift of restless fingers. They stopped when the muffled screams of thrusters slithered through the thick barriers of the AAL, tuning a frequency in their nerves, steadying their minds and bodies.

At least until they lurched off and the air, to Lil, somehow became colder. Despite being sealed off from the vacuum of space and its biting points of light, her toes and ankles were numb. Was her thermal working right? Diagnostics said yes. It was the stims, then, each artificial molecule soaking her inner fibers, touching and roaming through her to keep her stomach from trembling and the acids from choking.

The AAL's frame rattled as they passed through atmosphere. A buzzer screamed and they stood, taking hold of the hand rungs above. At last the floor creaked. The door dropped. Lil shut off, and felt warm.

The old temple complex was half in ruins by the time they hit dirt and third squad lurched down the ramp as one. Lil was at the rear and fanned out with Sixer, trailing right behind Forty and Three-Eight. Her comms flared with traffic, updates from the other squads rolling in one after the other.

"Sectors outside the drop zone are still hot. Secure an LZ for Lord Ren," K Company LT said, marking waypoints on their targeters. At Forty's signal, Zeroes, Nines and Sharp moved up alongside seventh squad. Blue bolts streaked by, her helmet filters making them little wisps of pale light.

Earth burst into the air, tossing stone over them and matting the fresh white armor in a layer of grit. Tie-wings howled overhead, washing the ruins in waves of green, the impacts shuddering through the ground and shaking her legs. In a step, she entered chaos, finely honed sensory filters guiding her hand. She drew a bead and bolted an Iridonian bounty hunter, then his Devaronian brother, too slow on the draw.

Their kind, even the hardened mercenaries, didn't stand a chance. Because they all fought alone, only looking out for themselves. Little more than feral prey lashing out at the wolf packs closing in on them.

Some managed to rally together. A band of them perched in the tumbling remnants of a tower forced K Company to duck in cover, sprays of blue chipping the edges of the wall and splashing out in the dirt, which was turning to mud under their feet. Even with the audio dampeners, the screech of the Ties nearly shut out their voices over the comms. Forty motioned with her hand. Movements. Then orders.

Three-Eight lurched off, swaying with the bulk of her heavy blaster as though it weighed nothing at all. Lil stayed under cover with Forty and Sixer, the former counting down from three fingers.

Sixer pitched forward as Lil and Forty sprang up, dousing the gunner perch in spitfire arcs of red bolts. Sixer snatched a thermal-det from his belt, tossing it high as he slid into cover. The burst rippled through Lil's chest and had the mercs, those not consumed by fire, in a daze. Forty bolted one twice through the head before he could bring his rifle back up. Crashing through a fallen pile of burning cedar, Three-Eight came around their flank, the buzz of her repeater and the rapid bursts of energy plowing into flesh and fluid an elating rhythm.

Rocket detonations rolled along the left, throwing two of fifth squad's heavy armored to the ground in a heap. Forty snapped her arm forward, twice. Move up.

That was when Sharp's vitals flat-lined.

Lil ducked, searching about. His IFF pulsed red on the other side of the complex to their rear.

"Hostiles, coming up from the sub-levels!"

Forty made a fist and circled it in the air. "Regroup!"

Something detonated, too close to Lil's face. Not that close, feet away. A thermal det? No, different kind of heat. A flamer. Someone's bolt had hit the flamer's pack, and for a moment she was blind. Then she was on the ground. Her body moved on its own. She didn't have to tell it what to do. She watched from her visor as the display hardware struggled to update after the amplifiers were overloaded. She watched herself crawl and sit up behind cover, armor scratching against charred stone. Waypoints fizzled to life again, reorienting her.

Forty was moving. They were under fire. Lil spun up, spared a moment to aim, and squeezed the trigger – her bolts went wild of the enemy, but threw sparks in their faces. When had the mercs plowed through seventh squad? How had they managed to wedge between the first wave and their support units? That was where Lil saw him, on the other side of a haze of red markers. She caught glimpses of Eight-Seven, a blazing beam of light in his hands. A Jedi weapon. Nines railed against it, riot stick flaring with the same energy, each blow against the blue saber hard and calculated. Each arc more powerful and beautifully timed than the last.

It made her think of Phasma. Primal like the mountains and beyond her ability for words. Things that were stalwart and always there, no matter the snows that covered them or the splinters of rock that tumbled free. Eternal things that would never crumble to ruins.

Not like here. They were the mountains here. Nines was the winter, his riot stick the landslide that would come down to crush the rogue river, the traitor.

But mountains didn't fall. Mountains couldn't lie down with a black hole in their breastplate, oozing with rapidly cooling embers. She'd seen the bolt hit from 'cross the complex. Saw his body twist and collapse by a fallen pillar. Nines didn't move after that. Lil thought that odd, despite the red marker flashing LOST in bright letters at the upper corner of her HUD. Nines always moved. If he was still it was because he was deep in thought, sinking into himself as he often did when they weren't fighting or sleeping. He never told her what he was thinking. She already knew.

Lil remembered she was walking, her blaster confirming kills as she went. The insurgents were surrounded, the traitor was there, arms up in surrender. The others had names, ones she only recognized because of the mission packets. They held the fighters at blaster point and Lil focused on Eight-Seven's eyes, stared into them so she could ignore the blur of white lying on the ground mere feet away. She thought of how easy it would be to pull the trigger. How big of a hole she could burn into his chest. How she could melt his face to the bone so no one would ever recognize him.

So that no one would ever remember him.

Forty stepped forward, snatching the lightsaber from his hand.

Alerts pinged over the comms from the battle net.

"Fighters inbound!" K Company leader barked. "Third squad: up front. Second and fourth: support!"

They set up position at the edge of the temple, just outside of the LZ. Out over the lake on a shaking horizon, Resistance fighters – at first nothing but white blurs against green – sharpened as they closed. Soon third squad would be in range of their laser cannons. They could return fire, but there was no point at that distance. The bolts would lose density and splash uselessly over their hulls.

Sprays of water burst behind the fighters, tidal waves rushing to consume them. Jittering like a hive of angry gnats, the Ties swarmed into the air over the temple, racing to meet the Resistance. They met in a clash of light that painted the sky with swells of orange, twisted metal falling to the waters and ruins below.

Lil picked targets as third squad tried focusing fire. The fighters were too fast. Auto-tracking couldn't keep up. She saw the laser cannon bolts before they hit. Knew their destination before they were more than a flare on the tip of an X-wing. Light burst and the world spun. The ground was hard against her shoulder and chunks of charred rock trickled atop her.

Warnings rolled down the side of her visor and somewhere in her mind it was processed. Somewhere, all of it fit and made sense. She didn't need it to understand the cinders flaring inside the black hole in Forty's chest plate, having seared through just to the right of her heart. The lightsaber was gone.

Eight-Seven was gone.

The temple they had torn down and taken for their own was now a Banshee pit, the shrieking predators picking them off at their leisure.

"Corpsman!"

Three Eight's battle harness was slag, twisted outward as if ripped at by the claws of a Drexl. Smoke poured off her, both from heated armor and burning flesh that'd been turned into cracking black flakes, pieces of it sliding off and dragging chunks of veins and skin boiled to sludge down to swirl in the mud.

Sixer fell to a knee and Three Eight's peeling hand fished for him. He brushed it away and hauled her over his shoulders. Too weak to shriek, all she could manage was a strangled whimper.

Again an alert sounded over the battle network and they were ordered to fall back to the dropships at the tree line. Sixer was already off.

Stragglers from K Company flooded into the birds still on the ground. A trooper waved them in, moving an arm to shield himself as a laser cannon ripped into a pair only a foot from the door. The edge of the blast caught him too.

There was no time to check for the dead.

The drop bay door closed as they thundered up, sealing them in the dark for those seven seconds it took for the overheads to kick on. The repulsors thumped with power and she was weightless as they beat into the sky. The lights snapped bright, splashing across every vacant seat and swinging hand rung. A corpsman strapped Three-Eight into the med-pod at the back, her chest seeming to move wrong with each weak breath.

Sixer's visor wouldn't leave her and the corpsmen faded to background noise, leaving just the two of them in the troop bay.

Nines hadn't kept his promise.

* * *

They started by flaying her skin in small sections to make room for the new layers. It would have to be completely regrown. Three-Eight had suffered fourth degree thermal burns on 51% of her body, while 30% had sustained only third degree. Only. As though scorched nerves and warped yellow skin were preferable. But they were. At least then the muscles might still work. At least then Three-Eight's face might not be completely black on one side, cracked on her cheek to reveal red filaments spilling over with boiled fat. From the flaying, caused more by the flames than the surgeons, her skin had crisped off completely over her forearm. Lil could see the caked remnants of sweat glands gathered along her shredded tendons.

She was floating in a bacta tank now, what few strands of hair that managed to cling to her shriveled scalp listing above her. Sixer's reflection was there with her, his nose almost to the glass. It was a slightly crooked nose from having never healed quite right after he'd– after Lil had broken it.

The med-droid twitched across the room, arms spinning as it looked down over terminal readouts, then to them. Its blue eyes lingered, as if annoyed by their presence and waiting for them to leave, so it could do whatever droids did when humans weren't looking.

Lil wanted to rip it to pieces. The thought curled up and faded away. It was just a droid. She wasn't supposed to feel this way, like when she'd broken Sixer's nose.

They hadn't been older than fourteen cycles, maybe.

Sixer fell, hocking blood as he struggled to sit up on an elbow. Most of it dribbled down his chin, mixing with the spatters of mud on his face. Lil's chest heaved, fists up at her sides. Sixer had lost. He'd underestimated her body weight and the force she could muster, like he always did, like she had counted on this time. He'd given her plump welts for it, one particularly stinging blow on her left breast. The trainers had once before commended him for making use of such a weakness.

"Continue." The Captain said.

They both paused and stared. The fights always ended when one of them lost their feet.

"Hit him again." Phasma said, freezing Lil's spine solid. Sixer closed his mouth and Lil straightened. A quick breath. Her fist sank into his cheek before he could think to move. The force turned him 'round, a hand slapping the slosh to keep his face from the mud.

"Again."

Lil's teeth set on edge. She put all the force she could muster into the blow. The Captain will know. Her thoughts said. She'll know if you're weak. Sixer bit down a shout before it could be much more than a pained grunt, trying to push himself up again.

"Don't let him get up."

Lil pitched forward, straddling Sixer and pinning his shoulders to the ground. He struggled, hate burning in his eyes now.

"What are you waiting for?"

So Lil hit him again, using the side of her hand instead of her raw knuckles. She felt bone between crushing flesh. Felt the blow like it was her own cheek.

"Again."

Sixer did shout this time, squirming and bucking with his hips. Angry. Desperate.

Pathetic.

"Again!"

Lil brought her hand down across his nose, the wet crack and cry splitting through her.

"Enough."

Zeroes wouldn't have hesitated. Three-Eight wouldn't have held back. Nines wouldn't have. He'd battered her along with El and Forty and Zeroes in other bouts. That was war, that was combat. That was life and death.

She had to be better.

She had to believe that Sixer would crack her nose and color her face. If she could believe that, she wouldn't have to touch the tidal pressure crashing under her ribs. She wouldn't have to wonder at the stirring whisper, the crawling bit of her mind that had reveled in lording over him – in breaking just a little piece of him. For all those moments she had been helpless and beaten. For that flaring instant she was powerful.

The trainers rounded up the Battalion and had them get on their hands and knees, putting them under the sting of the hoses. "To get you miserable lot clean," they said. It was easy enough to use the showers for that. They just liked to beat them with water since they couldn't use their fists anymore. For once Lil didn't mind.

Back in barracks they stripped, showered and entered the bacta tanks. She always dreaded the beginning, when she was hitched with a rebreather snug around her nose and mouth. When she was sealed inside the glass tube and the chemical treated liquid trickled under her toes. Rippling, as though hungry, it rose over her ankles and lapped along the backs of her calves, teasing its way up her thighs. It felt too cold just between her legs and she stifled a whimper. The bacta continued to wrap around her, taking all of her in, enjoying every little inch.

She couldn't breathe. Not until it was over her hair and gurgling to the top of the shaft. She was allowed to float then and let out the shuddering breath she'd been holding in. The rebreather clicked and hissed. This part, she liked. The bacta became warm, a soothing buzz that crawled into yellow-bled pores, soaking every cell and easing their aches. Lil liked to close her eyes so that it was dark, so she could be in that place where time didn't move, and there was only the beat of her heart in the water. Just warmth and no light. It put her to sleep, every time. A deep, heavy sleep that blanketed every inch of her, thick as though her muscles had molded into led.

That time, Lil hadn't slept.

The thirty minutes in bacta took a full cycle to creep through. When it was done, she marched to the bunks with the others, rubbing fatigue from her black-ringed eyes. She kept seeing Sixer's face, and how black she'd made his eyes too. Not just the outsides, but the insides. Every second that went by made her throat jerk a little harder, trying to work past a vice. Her pupils burned, but she wouldn't cry. She wouldn't ever cry.

Entering the refreshers behind the bunk room, she collapsed and threw up. Bile spilled through her lips and splashed into the grate, bits of half processed seeds clinging to her chin and neck as the mess trickled away into a sticky residue.

"You broke my nose," Sixer said, somewhere behind her.

"I know," she said.

There was a high-pitched click that sounded like the primer of a blaster's gas-tank. Sixer held out an injector to her. They weren't supposed to have those. He must've stolen it on the way out of the med-bay.

"I thought you'd get sick," he said, and she almost wanted to break his nose again. Her gut dropped. "You always get sick if you're really angry."

Throat hot with vomit, Lil snatched the injector and shoved it into her elbow, the fluids making her clean and cool.

They finished their training not long after and were able to talk again. He made jokes and let her forget, both of them succumbing to the comfort of knowing they wouldn't be ordered to do those things anymore.

Lil had let herself become complacent. That was why they were standing in the med-bay wide feet apart, unwilling to go back to a row of empty bunks.

A chill slithered up her back. Instinct twitched her right arm, though there was no blaster for her to lift. She turned, eyes locking with Two-Seven's silver pair, watching her from the corridor beyond.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Lil wasn't there when the life support started screaming. She came in after, when they drained the bacta tank and Three-Eight sat pressed against the glass, half stripped of skin. Two men from the MediCorps waited with a self-propelled lift hovering just a few feet over the floor. The officer with them, fitted in the usual midnight black uniform, checked his chrono and sighed. The techs, wrapped in hazmat suits, watched as the med droid hauled her out and dumped her on the lift. It gave a little under her weight, an arm swinging off the side. Wet muscle and tissue squeaked over plastic as the techs fit her into a bag. Her frame had always been on the bulkier side and they struggled a bit zipping her in, limbs pushing out the edges.

Before they left, the officer pivoted on a heel. "Have your bunks cleared by seventeen-hundred and report to your Storm Leader for reassignment," he said and marched from the med-bay, corpse in tow.

Cool ripples of bacta trickled down Three-Eights empty tank, the only open cylinder among rows and rows of calm, watery green. Without a word between them, she and Sixer went back to barracks for maybe the first time in the last twenty-four hours. There wasn't anything Lil really wanted to say. Just the thought of talking seemed an exhaustive effort.

The rest of the squad's things were gone, each drawer and locker picked clean. Like the others had simply never existed. Phantoms of their imagination. Lil donned her plastoid, fresh and clean after processing. The oil coating used to preserve the alloy was still a bit wet, greasing her fingers. She found comfort in the strong, bitter smell as she locked each piece in mechanically, functioning on mere muscle memory. Sixer moved the same, but slower, gaze hollow. No matter what angle she stood in his field of vision, he wouldn't look at her.

As it turned out, they didn't even have to report to the Storm Leader. New assignments cropped up on their datapads, along with a host of physical and psychological evaluations slated throughout the next week. Then more training, refresher courses, and they would be fit for combat duty again. They would officially be integrated with Seventh Squad, since Third was too far below its operational threshold and likely wouldn't be reinstated until replacements arrived. Seventh had seen nearly as many casualties as Third in the last few days. The whole Battalion would have to be reorganized.

At least today they would be planet-side again. Living on the ship was starting to wear on her nerves, hone them to a sharp, biting edge. They were rotating out with the 219th Battalion, CT Corps. Black duffel bags packed and slung over their shoulders, she and Sixer waited in the hangar with FN Corps as they were sorted to transport shuttles. It was a buzz of activity, each handful of troopers embarking on new assignments, ships coming and going like an insect hive. She spotted a few RC Corps squads filing into an AAL, spared for transport runs while the Upsilons carried the larger companies of FN.

Lil wasn't sure how she found him. Perhaps it was the stiffness in his posture, or the slow, measured way his body moved, but she saw RC-0227 on the left-wing formation. Her IFF confirmed as much a moment later. She nearly flinched when his visor rotated to settle on her. Had he been watching her too? It didn't matter, she held his stare, even if it made her stomach boil.

Sealing their helmets on, she and Sixer were the last to board a shuttle bound for Starkiller. The loading ramp closed and they kicked off. Lil experienced a moment of weightlessness. Her IFF pinged the rest of the troop-bay's occupants as FN Corps, from squads she'd never encountered or even met before.

She opened a private frequency to Sixer.

"Do you think they hate us?" she asked. His helmet remained locked on the far wall, but she knew he'd heard her. Maybe he didn't understand. "The Resistance, I mean."

Inertia pressed against her back as the ship banked. Lil sat her blaster rifle in her lap, toying with the settings. Like she had already done a hundred times since waiting in the Finalizer's hangar. Still he didn't answer her.

"They must," she said. No matter how many times she searched, how far in her memory she reached, it didn't make sense any other way. She simply couldn't wrap her mind around the Resistance as an entity. She understood it was a guerrilla army with enough backing to be a threatening military force. She understood the tactics they used. How they designed their operations to take down a larger and stronger foe. FN was one of the few Corps trained as a counter-insurgency unit – she knew everything about them.

But she didn't know why they hated the First Order so much.

Lil looked to Sixer beside her, still motionless, swaying only with the movements of the carrier. Heat swelled in her chest. "Are you taking up Sharp's post now?" she snipped. He only bowed his head and she cut the link, angry – ashamed.

Everyone lost comrades, but it was deeper than that. The Order trained them to move on, to carry the burden like Captain Phasma carried her cape. It was the echoes of the old Stormtrooper Legion's call to duty. She found the thought brought less comfort to her now. For the first time, her enemies seemed everywhere and unstoppable. She hated that feeling. Couldn't the Resistance see how much they were hurting the Galaxy? How all the Republic had done was splinter it in two? Couldn't they see how wrong they were?

Lil hugged her rifle to her breastplate, muzzle angled down.

As they entered atmosphere and local range of transmissions, an advisory appeared on her HUD. Starkiller was spinning up for another firing in the next few hours. The Upsilon shuttle came in on one of its many landing platforms along the snowy mountain caps. Just north of the firing trench. As the loading ramp descended, a gush of frozen air rushed into the opening. They were higher up now, by Processing Plant 19. Below, she could see one of the primary docking zones, designed for the mass of the Star Destroyers, now cleared for incoming ships.

Lil moved to release her harness and disembark when Sixer set a hand on her thigh plate. She paused, finding him concentrated on the floor. They'd landed just outside one of the topside hangar bays, which was already packed with Ties and AALs. Their crews and technicians were missing, a few stragglers descending below deck in preparation for the firing. From their ship, the other troopers grabbed their gear and lumbered down the ramp in an orderly fashion, automatically forming a small column and marching into the bay. Only then did Sixer move. As Lil stood, she saw one Stormtrooper linger out by the open blast doors a moment, hesitating. Male, by their frame. Two-Seven.

Lil followed Sixer onto the platform, where he collapsed atop a supply crate left nearby. A question parted her lips, until the pilot and his secondary came down the ramp.

"Problem?" one of them asked, EVA helm tucked under an arm.

"No, sir," Sixer said, hand over his chestplate, "respirator malfunction. I just need to correct it before reporting to inspections."

The pilots shared a glance, one of them shrugging. "Just be clear before the Deck Officer comes through," he said, and the two departed.

Lil watched them go, until she was sure they were beyond earshot. The lingering Stormtrooper was gone. "Six?"

"Little. We're leaving," he said, moving for the AAL's troop bay.

She stilled, suddenly as cold as the winds outside. "Orders?" she asked. She hadn't checked their data-feed the whole trip. Maybe he'd seen something she didn't, or her HUD's alert system wasn't working right. She towed behind, halting at the edge of the ramp.

"Yeah. Far away." Sixer stepped to the cockpit door and tapped in a code at the bulkhead. She didn't know where he'd learned the codes.

"What are you doing?"

The doors parted, the cockpit and its suite of controls open to them. He kept his back to her. "I won't stay here."

"Why?" There was a plea in her question, and it made him face her. Though only a few feet, the distance between them was all at once this deep, galaxy-spanning fissure. An un-seeable force that blocked her out, became utterly impassable and sickening her to the core. Specters of thought enticed her, whispered to her limbs, calling her to cross the threshold.

"I don't think I can do this anymore, Lil," he said, shoulders falling. He sounded beaten, and she remembered how defeated he'd looked on that muddy field five years ago. They stayed that way, seemingly miles and decades apart. She didn't know what to do, and Sixer could see it. He folded his vulnerability away. Lil didn't know why that hurt so much.

"I won't go to the Cages." Sixer made for the cockpit without her.

Her hands tingled, aching for action. The primer of a blaster whined. Sixer froze.

"Six," she said, hating how her voice shook. But the blaster in her hands remained steady, her finger poised over the trigger. "Don't."

Sixer turned, deliberately slow, but only halfway. His chin lifted, defiant like a snow layered mountain. For once she couldn't read him and her heart surged, ready to burst from her chest. His hands made fists.

The sky rumbled. Swathes of starlight curled and warped, painted over with splashes of green, blue and purple. The atmosphere-burn of the planetary shielding faded. A modulated voice hollered to them. The distraction was all that Sixer needed.

Something struck her arms off center and a back-hand came up across her helmet – she made hard contact with durasteel. A blur of white barreled past her, plowing into the trooper that had called out. Landing flat on his back, he struggled to gain his feet. Lil recovered just in time to see Sixer punching in the code to a maintenance bunker, buried within a rock face alongside the landing platform. She snatched her rifle up, stock to her shoulder.

She took a deep breath and her finger twitched. Another breath.

"Shoot him!"

The trigger started to give. Sixer disappeared within the bunker, a bolt blasting after him in futile pursuit.

Forgetting about the other trooper, Lil dashed to the entrance – its threshold shielded by a thermal barrier, but otherwise open. Red tubes lit up the grated floor, doing little to disperse the dense shadows clinging to the tight, narrow halls.

Lil cursed and keyed her comlink. "LP CON, FN-two-five-zero-one, E-band message. Over."

A pause. "Two-five-zero-one, LP CON, send. Over."

She paced outside the bunker, rifle down. "Two-five-zero-one, shooting incident, one Stromtrooper AWOL in grid nine-eight–" a hand grabbed her shoulder, everything spun, another set of digits clamping around her throat. They dug under her jaw as she was lifted up, heels dragging. Boarder rails punched into her back plates, allowing her to see the Stromtrooper with her neck in a vice. Long enough for her HUD to flag his IFF. The one Sixer had shoved in his race to escape. RC-0227.

He pivoted, vaulting her. She hit the floor, brain bouncing harder than a bolo ball. With it all her years of precise training pattered out in a mess of wild, thrashing instinct. Two-Seven was already pitched atop her, thumb digging into her larynx as she tried to break his hold. He pressed a knee on her breastplate to keep her pinned.

"You had the chance. I knew you were weak," he snarled, other hand coming down as she struggled against him. "I knew you were just like me."

The Controller from LP CON buzzed in her ears. "Two-five-zero-one, your transmission cut off, send again. Over."

Lil could feel her blood flow stutter, like a bolt being tightened around her trachea. But Two-Seven's grip relented, just barely.

"It just doesn't… make… sense," he said the words like he didn't understand them. "Why all the training? All the beatings and the weeks in Iso if it doesn't mean anything? If some frack in a Tie fighter can wipe you with the squeeze of a finger?" he sounded so lost, so confused when he asked.

"Two-five-zero-one, respond. Over."

"I mean, you've thought the same thing, right? I could see it in your face on the Finalizer." a small, gasping chuckle left him. "Why aren't you dead? What makes you so special?"

A small squeak of air passed her lips unchecked and she forced herself to stop, to hone in on response, even though the light was dimming. His stance changed as he leaned into her, straddling her.

"Why are you alive? Why do we get slaughtered while that frack Eight-Seven gets away with it?!" Those thumbs plunged against her airways, stressing cord and membrane to breaking.

Adrenaline surged through her, a tidal wave of energy that still seemed like too little. Lil slammed her arms into the creases of Two-Seven's elbows, drawing out a shout. He pitched forward and she cracked her faceplate against his. Whether it blinded him as much as her, she didn't have time to decipher. Straining, she threw him off, the effort leaving her fumbling drunkenly for some semblance of balance. Black prisms burned over the world like pulsing sunspots, but discipline gave her enough presence of mind to know the battlefield: her blaster rifle was out of reach, tossed somewhere out of sight.. Automatically, she touched the sidearm at her thigh. The same one he was sure to have.

Lil scrambled to her feet, blaster pistol primed in both hands. Light cracked, but the bolt streaked through air as two hundred pounds of stiff muscle and plastoid collided with her. They staggered in a moment of struggle, where he managed to grab her arm, beating her wrist and the crease of her elbow. Her hand opened on reflex and the blaster clattered between their feet.

Their Mandalorian trainer had called it the weakness of weapons. Knives, blasters, slug-throwers – they were just tools to make the acts of war more expedient, more efficient. It was soldiers, Stormtroopers, that were the real killers and destroyers. In her panic, she'd forgotten that vital lesson. She'd punish Two-Seven for forgetting too. He'd focused too much on taking her blaster, leaving himself open. She could have dulled his grip and shoved him away, regained her bearings, but she'd be extending the same courtesy. Act, don't react.

The move was calculated and hard – she landed a fist on his helmet, drawing a bone-numbing ache in her knuckles. Two-Seven would be seeing black holes, but his grip held fast and he tried to leverage her body weight, until she yanked him gut first into an armored knee. Plastoid crunched and he gasped, fingers flying open. She locked her hands together and railed him over the head.

It was one thing to trust the body as a weapon instead of its accessories, and it was another to use every advantage to attain victory – to survive. When facing an opponent of equal skill, having any upper hand meant everything.

Lil reached to her lower back and drew a vibro-knife, reverse grip, angling a thrust towards Two-Seven's neck. His arm was there to block hers and their movements blurred in a winding pattern of swipes and parries. He twisted with a block, revealing his side and her heart leapt, fevered nerves quirking her lips in a smirk as she drove the knife to his lung. She wasn't prepared for the hard elbow that crushed down on her arm, disabling her thrust. A lapse gasped between them, allowing him to dip into her guard and shove.

Lil kept her feet, barely managing to block a thrust-slash from Two-Seven as he drew his own vibro-knife. She stepped back from the first and fore-walled the second. It was a longer blade than hers, with a wide tip designed for making deep, tendon shearing cuts. The fight had already lasted too long – for both of them. Thirty seconds was enough to deduce a pattern, a style, and they'd both received the same training. Now it came down to who was faster, who was stronger, as they zeroed in on the task they'd been designed for. Each using the hard bones in their forearms to absorb momentum and divert attacks, conditioned all throughout their life to endure the welting pain. Hours against the Trandoshan slave batons, two meters of hard wood with resin that bit into the skin and nothing but naked tissue to defend themselves. The solid weight of it cracking their flesh until their arms were little more than trembling remains of black and blue meat.

What moved between them was an arc of grapples, seeking to disable the other for a well-placed knife, only to be parried to the side or averted with savage precision. A contest of who could make one vital mistake – just one. Because each moment that passed was a clue given to the other, an attunement of instinct that searched for every opportunity to inflict damage. Like the Firaxa sharks of Manaan, dark eyed predators hunting for weakness.

In the span of seconds, Plastoid clapped and grunts were exchanged as the two weapons collided again and again. Lil threw off a grapple and went for another stab, his neck. But the trap was sprung. Two-Seven's free arm came up to block hers, trapping her arm up and allowing him under her guard again. His knife flared.

Lil screamed as it ripped across her abdomen, blood spitting on the wall. Phasma's voice lorded over her, urging her to plunge further into the tidal current of adrenaline instead of succumbing to the hurt. Her teeth clamped hard enough to break, screeching out sounds she didn't know she could make. Two-Seven stepped in again, slipping her knife arm away and coming back with another thrust. She forearm parried with unchecked force, snatching his wrist in the same movement, her blade zeroing in – she had him.

White flashed forward, his fist thwacking her faceplate. Lil staggered, another stab of fear and hate driving her to counter attack. There was a fore-wall block waiting for her, followed by a burst of needles as his right elbow crunched down on her knife hand. Nerves shuddered and she dropped the blade, armor the only thing saving her cartilage. All at once his blows became more vicious and all Lil could manage were feeble attempts to stave off cuts and jabs, each attempt weaker than the last.

She had to change the tempo. With his next extension into her guard, Lil moved to grab his knife arm at the elbow, intending to strike his hand – until he punched the raw wound at her gut. It was like a plasma cutter plucking each strand of sinew at once. A stifled shriek clawed from her throat, rupturing a new sting. As his blade angled down for a slash at her neck, she fore-walled again and hammered a fist into his wrist, trauma forcing him to release the knife. It clattered at their feet.

Two-Seven was already moving, aiming for her stomach. Lil swiped an arm down to knock it away – but she'd done exactly what he wanted. He'd put the fear of pain in her. His other hand crashed against her faceplate, so hard a crack splintered across the visor. She fell back against the corridor wall, struggling to keep her balance. As he came in, she rammed a heel to his thigh and he buckled. Then, arm cocked, wound an elbow into his helmet. The force knocked him to the floor, but back in range of his fallen knife.

Muscles contracted, yanking at her lungs in desperate pleas for air. Lil had two options.

She wouldn't make it outside the bunker to her blaster rifle, too much time for him to draw his sidearm, which she wouldn't recover either. That, and Lil could already feel the energy being sapped from her limbs as her body struggled to keep up with the loss of blood. She couldn't tell if anything internal had been hit, her intestines maybe. All Two-Seven had to do was outlast her and the wound would do all the work for him, allowing him to cut and slice away her defenses until he could deliver a killing blow.

Lil staggered several steps into a run, breaking to lose herself in the maintenance bunker. The heat of blaster bolts chased her, just as she rounded a corner. Metal burst and molten pain ate into her side, but she kept running. If the thundering of her steps on the walkways hadn't been so loud in her own ears, Lil would've thought she heard Two-Seven calling after her.

She jumped and juked down corridors and alleys, diving ever further into the plant's cramped maze. The ordered halls soon became disorganized. Pathways corroded from chemical spills and fluid lines detached from their mounts, the sounds of liquid slapping metal far below her. Lil only stopped when the ache in her ribs began to overpower her fight or flight, and she collapsed against a nearby rail. Space echoed, walls and shielding groaning like the bowels of a sarlaac.

Sliding to her rump, Lil's fingers tested the wound, sparking waves of ice-fire. Crimson seeped from her stomach, dark globules carving streaks over her white plates. The medical injectors must've been damaged. Reaching to her side, she found charred and warped plastoid from Two-Seven's blaster pistol too. Judging from the sting, her skin had been proximity crisped. She fell back against a support bar, each movement driving ionized spikes into her intestines, as though she were tearing the wound open a little more each time. Lil prepared herself for what came next.

Stripping out of her upper armor sleeves was an agonizing process, but there was no other way to reach the wound easily. Besides, the armor was trashed, it wouldn't do her any good against Two-Seven. Warm blood soaked down between her legs and over her thighs. The wound trembled from the touch of cold air. Sifting through the medkit at her belt, Lil applied bacta spray, draining the small capsule of its supply. It was enough to wash over her organs and plug the wound, barely. The flesh was still tender and felt stretched to bursting whenever she moved.

Resting her head back, Lil finally had the presence of mind to tap her comlink. It wouldn't be long before Two-Seven caught up to her.

"LP CON, FN-two-five-zero-one," she said between gulps for air, forgetting etiquette. Static reigned over the channel.

"LP CON, do you read me? Over." she emphasized the last word. Sometimes they wouldn't answer unless it was done right. But still, no response. Just then she thought to check the relay on her HUD display, which fuzzed in and out from the beating her helmet had taken.

Her transponder was shot.

"Frack!" Lil tore the thing off and tossed it hard down the catwalk. It made an unsatisfying clack against a bulkhead before rolling to face her. She soon regretted the outburst as her abdomen shattered with pain. For a while, she simply sat there, holding her stomach and running over her options.

Wherever Sixer was, he was far ahead of her by now. Knowing him, he would work his way back to the landing platform, or an entirely different sector, and wait to steal away on a transport again. Something was happening out there too. With the shielding down, malfunctioning, whatever it was, it couldn't have happened at a worse time. Lil wouldn't let him get away, and now with a rogue trooper on her trail, no back up and no weapons, she had little choice.

The pathway she found herself in was heavy with shadow, given light only by the occasional emergency bulb. Steam creaked and hissed out of vapor-control valves, Starkiller's myriad of mechanisms all speaking their disjointed tones. A damp chill washed her skin, dried her blood.

This was her element – this was where she was born. The First Order had always been survival of the fittest. For too long she'd been reliant on the squad for her shortcomings. Had been blind to Eight-Seven's betrayal. Lil was responsible for all those deaths just as much as he was, and she wouldn't let that happen a second time. She wouldn't be the weak one anymore. It was up to her to keep Three-Eight's promise to Six, the one she'd made after their Decimation.

She resolved, then and there, to kill Sixer – no matter if Two-Seven got in her way. This was her test, her trial by fire. Eight-Seven had been the weak link in their chain, and now it lay in pieces at her feet. But she wouldn't let them break her.

First, she had to deal with her hunter.

Lil began to snap off the rest of her plastoid, down to the black bodysuit underneath. With it she would only be a bright white target against the gray and black surfaces. Two-Seven, she had to assume, still had the benefit of his HUD and its thermal and night-vision filters. The former she wouldn't have to worry about too much, not with so much energy and heat passing through one place, still, her form might still stick out. She had to be careful how she traveled and where she stood. The bodysuit would regulate her temperature, but without the armor, she didn't have the benefit of shielding from sensors.

Under her feet the cool walls descended into a well of darkness, where leaking hydro-systems pattered like the caves in the mountains. Piece by piece, she tossed her armor over the edge of the walkway and into its depths. They slammed and clattered to unseen junctions of Starkiller. From there, she stuck close to the walls where heat was more likely to collect from auxiliary reactors and their coupled power generators. The walkways became tighter as she went; faded, half-rusted signs trying in vain to decipher her location. She was lost.

The ramps led her down, deeper into Starkiller, as though she were in its cold, gentle mines again. Soon, she found the heart of the processing plant – one of the planet's city-sized power converters. In a step the space opened, lending her breath back from those cramped halls she'd fled down. Cylindrical and bulbous induction pillars towered before her like skyscrapers, lighted only by dim rivers of electricity rolling periodically down their length. Beyond the forest she could just barely make out the massive silhouette of the power converter. A beating, heat pulsing body of durasteel shaped in a perfect sphere all the way around, encased by a thick jungle of pipes, wiring and conduits. Whining turbines somewhere beneath the induction spires spun up the hydroelectric systems, yet another piece of the grand machine. Along with the unsynchronized clangs of converter pistons, it created a discordant kind of symphony.

Panels of computing stations made the darkness above and below glow with starlight specks of green and blue and red. Despite her situation, she couldn't help but wonder how long it had been since anyone last set foot in the underworld beneath the planet's crust. The surface appeared so white and organic, it was easy to forget the terra forms were just a mask for the mechanism.

Gradually, the darkness began to weigh on her, but the echoing slaps and shrieks stopped making her flinch as she was absorbed in it. The narrow gangway led her to the skin of an induction spire. Here, she made sure to avoid the cooling fluid pumps and the square, rigid formations of the anti-resonance plating.

"Little Kinrath pup, all by her own now."

Lil froze. Pistons churned, hives of busy circuit conductors chittering. If he wanted to kill her, she'd have been dead already. Even though her eyes had adjusted, the black of the conversion core was near impenetrable despite the tiny civilizations of light. It was nowhere near enough. Lil remained absolutely still, controlling her breathing. Then, timing her steps with the ringing claps of pistons, took slow steps towards what sounded like a reactor. There would be clouds of heat with it, masking her. But if he was moving on her level of walkways, she wouldn't be able to tell. The motion of the processing plant reverberated along the grating, at the very least making the quivering in her chest bearable.

Still, the silence broke her. "Why are you doing this?" she asked, throwing her voice. No response. She strained her ears, but he was being just as careful. Warmth poured over her skin as she closed within proximity of the reactor, drawing out beads of sweat. Eyelids squinted as she scanned the darkness. "You're a traitor."

Steam cracked from a temp-control pipe. Her heart thundered. The heat was making it hard to breathe.

"I am a monument to your sins," he said, voice seeming to come from all around.

Something hard hit the floor below her. Lil put herself low. Smart, he'd positioned himself below her, that way he might be able to see any gaps her form would create in the starlight canopy. Steadily, Lil moved to the edge of the railing. She had to keep him talking.

"Who are you?" she asked. Lil knew very well who he was, but the answer didn't satisfy her. She didn't know RC-0227, not like she'd known El-Tee. Not like she'd known Nines. She grimaced at the feeling that had possessed such a question from her.

"I could ask you the same," he cooed. Lil grabbed hold of the rails and slipped between them to the outside, senses tingling with the unknown. "I know who I am – a traitor... a fracking traitor who was too much of a coward to die with the others. But who are you?"

"FN-2501," she said to the darkness, easing herself down, searching the air with her foot for another railing.

"Who are you?" he asked again, his voice level now instead of bouncing between spaces. Lil set foot on the catwalk, trying to stay within range of the reactor. She'd been right.

"Lil."

Where was he? Thin skin over her abdomen burned, ripe to split again. Lil tried to fight the nausea, a wash of dizzying specters drawing her forward. She halted with a rattling step on the walkway. Stones bundled in her throat, waiting for Two-Seven to move in on her misstep. Why couldn't she find him? She should have been able to at least see the faint presence of his armor. Had he taken it off? She shook her head, jostling a headache to life, but keeping her balance.

"Who are you?"

Frustration twisted tight around her chest. "I'm Lil," she snarled.

"That's just a nickname. Droids get nicknames," his words glided down her neck, chilling her stiff. Gently, she turned, peering into the blackness. "Because droids are just numbers."

There was nothing but darkness. She whispered, as if afraid to wake it. "It's me."

"NO!" Something heavy crushed her side, throwing Lil into the solid rebar of railing. She tumbled over end, just barely managing to grip the edge of the catwalk. Her knuckles turned white, pressing hard enough to blunt her nails over the durasteel. Sweat slicked between her flesh and metal. She felt the edge glide from her finger tips.

For a blissful, terrifying moment, she seemed to be floating.

Her body me steel with a wet crunch and she screamed, stifling it halfway. All at once she became dizzy from the shock, every part of her arm pulsing and ripping from a dislocated shoulder.

Two-Seven's voice howled after her. "It's just a tag – a marker for identification! Empty. People only remember numbers to measure victories in slaughter. No one remembers you!"

"Who are you?!"

Lil couldn't possibly answer, not while gasping for air from the sudden impact. She writhed for an unbearable minute. Metal rattled as feet rushed along a catwalk. He was coming for her. Lil sat up and crawled across the platform, feeling for an edge at every inch. She was down by one of the pumps now, a huge series of humming engines and rotating cylinders. Red light lanced out of grates beneath, casting strange shadows up into the walkways. Two-Seven's footsteps became louder, each one bringing him closer. She panicked, pulling herself into a small alcove next to a dripping coolant vent.

The footsteps stopped. She held her breath. For a time, the clank of the pistons beat a heart shaking pulse. Shadows danced in tribal celebration.

His voice slithered along the walls. "We're the same, you and I," he said. It was getting hard to focus, her mind dripping with chemicals to dull the sense of pain pouring from her arm. Oscillators thrummed their cooling tune, making his voice come from everywhere.

"I'm nothing like you," she growled, damning herself for rising to the bait.

"You're everything like me."

Lil propped herself up against the vent, setting a palm against her protruding shoulder. "I'll kill you," she said, using that hate, that fury to brace herself. She sucked in a deep breath and, clamping her teeth, shoved on her shoulder. The bone crunched back into place and she muffled a cry, teeth drawing blood from her lower lip.

"I'm keeping the Order strong," Two-Seven said. He sounded close, maybe on the other side of the pump. "We can't both make it out of this maze."

Steadily, Lil gained her feet. She stayed pressed to the wall, thighs trembling – veins shaking. It took three more quivering breaths to venture from her cove, darting eyes trying to decipher his shape in the shadows. The engines whirled.

For a flash - she saw his frenzied eyes.

A red bolt lanced and she dove. Fire tasted her back as she came to land beneath a piston, now arcing down to crush her. Lil rolled from its vector, just a hair's breadth from where it would have flattened her skull. The sour scent of burnt skin numbed her nose and the muscles of her back drew taut, boiled and crisp.

Down here, the pistons were deafening, each impact shaking her vision, which was blurred and swayed like a malfunctioning turbo lift. With it came a compressing ache at the back of her skull, shoving itself down on her cortical stack of nerves. Lil fought it, willing her body to keep going. She'd endured worse pain than this – this was nothing.

She was a layer below the pump now, pistons hammering alongside her, some in front of her.

"Come out, come out, little soldier..." Two-Seven sang, voice like water over glass, smooth through the hammers. She watched them, eyes darting, until she was sick of how well she knew the timing. It had to be perfect, or she would never make it through the gauntlet to the other side. Just one piston to stomp out her foot or a hand, and she'd be done for. The others would come down to grind her to pulp, and she'd be another corpse lost in Starkiller's womb.

"Little tin soldier... little doll..."

"You don't even know what that word means," she spat, launching forward on her elbows and knees through the first row of pistons. A new ache pulsed in her side, something broken. Lil counted the seconds in her head, shaking it to keep everything steady.

"Better than you do," Two-Seven said, farther away now. He didn't know where she was. Lil scurried under the next ring of pistons. She had to get back to the surface. She couldn't fight him down here, she had to escape. Just downrange of the pump as it curved up into the darkness, there was a dotting of light. Tenacity filled her heart again, set her blood on edge. A deep breath. She muscled through the third row, and her leg stopped short. Something caught.

Everything went blank. Lil reacted on pure fear. She ripped her legging and the tendons beneath it, just as the piston cracked down where her foot had been. She didn't have time to breath, because the sight just beyond the next row took it away.

Water pattered by a drainage valve gushing over a rusting grate. Empty white armor lay twisted in a heap about the floor. An empty shell abandoned and discarded. Her armor. Not only hers, but another set too, meticulously laid out beside it.

"Oh-one no-one... do you like that name? It's truer than anyone else's..."

He was just trying to get into her head. That's all he was doing, trying to set her off balance. None of it was true. Lil knew who she was. She wasn't those beaten, twisted pieces of armor. The pistons railed their pillars, the reverberations shaking Lil to the bone. She didn't doubt herself, no matter what Two-Seven said – she couldn't. It wasn't the First Order that was wrong, it was the galaxy. This was life, this was reality.

"We're just children, Lil! Children sacrificed at the altar of war!" He screamed, frustrated, as if in answer to her thoughts.

A rattling crash erupted on the opposite side of the pump. The sounds of a predator rushing towards it followed. Lil didn't waste the opportunity. She scurried out of cover, her final barrier passed. She left the pistons and the steaming heats behind, rushing down a cool corridor of pulsing red lights. Alerts, but what for? There was a maintenance ladder at the end, cramped and musty. Lil climbed out of the red pit, swept up in waves of chilled air. As she ascended, she felt a shudder rumble through the complex. Not a mechanism. An explosion? Another followed soon after.

Lil put it out of mind for the time being. Finding her way up and out of the plant, she came across signs along the walls again and picked a destination she knew to be on surface level: Fluid Control Center 19.

The pathways became lighted again, blue and crisp and clean, air flowing properly through the halls. Lil rounded a curve in the corridor and walked straight into an empty control room. Emergency lights flashed periodically, a muted red. Beyond the windows were Starkiller's snowy caps. Lil's brow furrowed as she stepped further in, a blast of a fire in the distance catching her breath. Marching up to the glass, she came face to face with her reflection, not recognizing the person staring back at her. First of all, her armor was missing, her new and pressed plastoid and visored helm. Some of her short blonde hair was singed off, fresh cuts seeping over purple welts on her forehead and cheek. Her eyes appeared sunken, probably from lack of sleep, black rings making her appear eons older, smooth lips cracked and split now. Her body, her toned, warrior body, was in ruins. Sliced open and burnt and scarred and bruised and scabbing and bleeding.

Who are you?

Beyond her, she could see small shapes – star fighters – zipping through the low, misty clouds. X-wings and Ties. A whirlwind of adrenaline swept her up in its current, assaulting her haggard thoughts with too many questions. Lil turned–

Two-Seven stood in the doorway.

A blaster pistol was held level with his hip, muzzle trained on her. Every receptor tingled, sensing the burn of compressed energy before it could even leave the chamber. Primal instinct responded, fingers folding to make fists, but her shoulders drooped as both her mind and body gradually came to the same bleak realization. She was tired, and felt it weigh over every part of her being, ready to finally rest. To stop fighting. To stop thinking.

"Answer me. Who are you?" Two-Seven said, quiet. His silver eyes were blazing, but she looked again, beneath his stone-carved features. There was something there she'd seen in Three-Eight, back on their snowy hilltop. A deep-seated fear. He didn't understand the answer any more than she did. That was what he was searching for – as much as he was hunting prey. He was hunting for answers. And he'd convinced himself she was the only one able to give them to him.

"I'm a soldier," she said, keeping herself from eying his blaster as ideas and scenarios crawled into her thoughts. Manipulation and force.

"Then who is the enemy?" He asked.

Lil, slowly, lifted her hands, bowed her head a little, assuming a non-dominant stance. Weak. Beaten. She took a small step towards him. "The Resistance."

His eyes squinched as they tracked her, but he didn't seem to be seeing her. They looked far away. "Enemy."

"Yes." she took another step, then another.

"Enemy."

Lil was within a few feet. Just a little more. "They're the enemy," she said, and it tasted like a lie.

Two-Seven came back to himself, raising the blaster – just as she swung a kick at his hand. The blaster went clattering and she stepped into a punch, left arm coming in at a wide arc to double the force with momentum. He stopped it with both arms up around his head. Then he snatched her wrist. Pain splintered through the side of her head as his bare knuckles collided with her skull. Everything erupted black and shook, the same hand coming down on her tricep. Lil felt her arm pass in front of her from the strike, numbness wriggling in her abdomen and the right side of her body. But she moved with her momentum, spinning around and extending her leg – still half blind. Her heel landed in his stomach, lifting him off the ground for just a moment.

No sooner had he doubled over than Lil launched another kick, aimed for his chin. Two-Seven sidestepped, barely, stumbling too close in. Gone were the refined strikes and arcing movements of trained killers. Every swing was drunk with fatigue, each dragging on with too much momentum, leading from one sloppy strike-counter to the next. Lil tried to back pedal and put distance between them again, but he didn't stop, even when she threw a punch at his head. He just brought his arms up again, parrying her hand. He pushed and then her side was facing him, arm up, totally exposed. She buckled as his shin plowed into the back of her legs, lifting her off the floor – where she landed flat on her back. Air flew from her lungs and she spent precious moments struggling to get it back. Lil climbed to her knees, only just, waiting for the next hit to come.

The familiar whine of a blaster pistol hit her instead, and a cold ring touched her forehead. "You always knew how this was going to end," he breathed, chiding. Almost lamenting.

Seconds lapsed by, filled with their heaving gasps. Outside, the battle in the skies raged.

Two-Seven twitched, eyes darting to the entryway. He spun – bolts streaked and Two-Seven smacked the floor, writhing, mouth open in soundless screams. It happened so fast Lil didn't have any time to react, could only lurch forward at the blur of white across from her. Two-Seven left her mind. Maybe it was the abuse finally catching up with her, but she was in a state of floating, like in her dreams.

A body lay motionless at the open blast doors, garbed in white armor. For a horrible, bloated moment, she couldn't move. Couldn't hear or feel. Lil came to her feet, only to crumble to her knees again as she reached the Stromtrooper that had saved her.

Sixer lay there, head resting on a shoulder as his remaining eye stared at nothing, a smoking hole plunging into the left side of his head.

"Six..." she said, so low she wondered if she'd said anything at all. A cold hand wrapped around her, like the snows of Starkiller and Csilla, like the ashen world of her dreams. An embrace she'd confused for comfort icing her with its hard reality. She was sitting in that tent again, but there were no bodies to warm her, no one to share in this moment of naked weakness. Lil wanted to know when he started tailing her, how she'd become such easy prey.

There was always someone looking out for her. Whether it was El-Tee and his firm guidance. She thought fatherly was a good word for it. She'd never had one of those. Or if it was Nines and his easy touch, reassuring her with just his presence. Or Forty, disciplining her when she stepped out of line, keeping her from the scrutinizing eyes of the officers. Zeroes and Sharp, showing her by trial to survive, hurting her in sparring to show her where she was weak, where enemies would take advantage of her and steal her from them. Slip and his fervent loyalty, his strong belief in the Order that reminded her of her place. Eight-Seven's quiet resolve, keeping her head level in the worst of it on Csilla. Even Three-Eight, and how she refused to rely on anyone but herself. An impenetrable wall given human form.

And Sixer, who'd come when she needed him most. Even after she'd betrayed him.

She was, for the first time in her life, completely alone.

A pitiful sound reached her from across the control room. A blast, closer this time, shook the floor. Lil stood, following a smeared trail of blood to the view ports.

"I don't want to die," Two-Seven whimpered, choking on a sob. "I don't want to die." He'd stopped struggling, likely too weak now, eyes screwed shut as he repeated his prayer. The bolt had scorched into his chest, just between the neck and shoulder opposite his heart. The tissue that hadn't been singed and blackened would be seeping fluid into his pulmonary tree, and in minutes he would drown in his own blood.

"Please don't leave me," he said as she came before him, something so pleading in his eyes, so much more vulnerable than she'd ever thought possible for him, and she saw him. She saw Two-Seven for what he really was. For what, she entertained in that odd moment of drifting, all of them might be deep in their core.

"Please don't kill me."

She saw a scared little boy, tears rolling down his dirtied face. A child baptized before the altar of war.

Lil felt like she should hate him. Part of her did – more than part. Every inch of her ached for violence, like she'd been taught. Wanted nothing more than to ruin his face to pulp, wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze the last bit of life from him. For Sixer. For herself.

Suddenly, she was a child again too. Standing out on those frozen, muddy fields with the stink of vomit and sweat. Her fists bloodied while Sixer glared up at her, knowing there was no succor or mercy to be had, no matter how much she might have wanted to give it.

Lil felt her anger melt away.

She settled to her knees beside Two-Seven, warm blood seeping through her bodysuit and soaking her skin. Taking him in her arms, she let his head rest in her lap and when he clutched for her, she held his hand, so at least his last moments wouldn't be without the heat of another, somewhere cold and alone.

"What's your name?" She asked. It seemed only right that she should know it before he died.

Two-Seven shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Look... none of it matters." he pointed to the battle beyond the view port, where the X-wing fighters of the Resistance were peeling off, explosions blossoming from a flat structure she recognized. The thermal oscillator.

"It'll be over soon," Two-Seven croaked, blood spurting from his trembling lips. "Then there'll be no one left who will remember us... doesn't matter."

Through a filter of glass and distance, the Resistance assault could have been happening on another planet, while she watched from the detached comfort of a holo-vid. Streaks of green from point defense turbo lasers burned the sky, wavering into non-existence the farther they traveled, dissipating like the sickness that had embroiled her all her life. The sickness of fear. Here, on the pillar of their Empire, raised with her hands and stained with her blood – here they were supposed to be invincible. The galaxy wasn't supposed to be able to touch her here. Lil had been told, time and again, that something like this could never happen.

The control center buzzed with vibrations from internal fractures, trapped heat from the oscillator escaping to the core works. Maybe this had been imminent. Maybe Two-Seven was right. What was the point in the pain they'd endured if the galaxy could take away all their triumphs so easily? If order and training meant nothing? Why had they done it? Why hadn't the righteousness of their cause been enough?

Warmth brushed her face and she flinched at the gentleness of it. Her eyes, cobalt steel, met Two-Seven's stormy gray. His lips parted, but he couldn't speak, not while drowning. His fingers glided down the side of her neck, leaving small trails of blood as they fell away to rest limply on her chest.

Chin up, little soldier.

The weight in her arms became heavy. Two-Seven's eyes fixed wide, staring scared into nothing.

Something wet touched her cheeks. It came over her slowly, tugging on her trembling lips. But she couldn't hold it in. Her armor shattered and Lil sucked in a heaving gasp, clutching Two-Seven close as her shoulders shook with quiet sobs. And she couldn't stop it. Everything came tumbling out – and she clung tight to Two-Seven, crying into his neck.

Imperial children were never afraid.

Imperial children never cried.

Power surges snapped at the nearby consoles, calling her back. Beyond the control center, the oscillator erupted in a rose of flame, a hot scorch of light in a dark world. Snow lifted in curtains with it, releasing arcing fissures of energy like the whipping tendrils of a leviathan. Ice-splitting fractals caved the mountains and swallowed the walls and towers, sucking everything down into a fiery maw.

Lil sat there holding a corpse to her breast, the last Stormtrooper of FN Corps' 343rd Battalion – watching as her entire world crumbled.

And then there were none.


End file.
